The Ghosts of a Memory
by Elle Aitch
Summary: After missing for several weeks, Danny returns with no memory of what happened to him.  Determined to find out the truth, Danny tries to uncover the mystery of his disappearance even though he risks destroying himself in the process.  No PP.
1. Chapter 1:  The First Day

**Chapter One: The First Day**

**Disclaimer: You all know how this goes. I don't own Danny Phantom.**

The first day is always the worst, always the hardest, always the most confusing, and as Danny walks up towards the steps of his high school, he wonders if he's really ready for this. It's been a week, though, so why shouldn't he be ready?

_Because I still don't know what happened, _he thinks, answering his own thoughts, but he says nothing to his friends as they continue to argue about something. Is it video games? Danny thinks it is, but he's been having trouble keeping focused this morning. On the surface there's nothing wrong with him. His dark hair shines in the sunlight, the raven locks as messy as they were a month ago before it happened, and the dark circles surrounding his eyes are still as pronounced as they were when he spent every night battling evil specters. He hasn't been fighting ghosts since he returned—his friends are the ones handling it, as are his parents and a couple of other local ghost hunters who began picking up the slack when he originally vanished—but he hasn't been sleeping well, just the same, and his pale complexion and bloodshot eyes show it by far more clearly than he could ever say. It's one of the few signs that there's something clearly wrong, one of the signals that even brainless jocks like Dash will pick up on the instant he walks through those doors, but Danny knows that his family is right. As messed up as his life has become, Danny knows that he has to do this, that he must return to his life, to normalcy, to school.

Shifting the purple backpack on his shoulder ever so slightly, an action performed more out of habit than actual discomfort, Danny continues to ignore his friends' conversation. Danny is sure that they asked him a question or two at some point, but neither one pressed him when he didn't respond. They know that there's something wrong, and even though they don't know what, they understand that what he needs is a break. Just a bit of time to get his mind back together, to get his head back in the game and to get back to being his old self. Just a little bit more time is all that Danny needs, and then everything will be the way it is supposed to be.

Subconsciously, he finds himself humming a song again as he arrives at his locker, spinning the combination around to the right numbers even though it's been weeks since he entered the code. "How is it that I can't remember anything that happened during those three weeks but I can still remember my stupid locker combination?" he grumbles, the first thing he's said to Sam and Tucker all morning since a mumbled greeting on the front porch, and the two of them instantly stop the conversation they were having. He's pretty sure he interrupted one of them—Tucker, he thinks—but neither one seems upset about it. They just look relieved that he's said something at last.

"I didn't even think you knew your locker combination," chuckles Tucker, trying to keep the conversation going, but there's no happiness behind the sound. It's more like he's also trying to force himself into a routine that all three feel they've lost permanently along the way somewhere. "Usually you just wait until the hallway is empty and then you phase your hand through it."

"I do not," Danny grumbles, but he knows that Tucker's right. Normally Danny does just grab his books using his ghost powers since he's usually running so late to class that the hallways are already empty and a blatant display of his abilities doesn't matter. He would do it today, too, but what Danny won't tell his friends is that he's scared to use his powers. Even though his ghost form and powers seem okay, they're not. There's something painful now about going ghost, something about it that simply hurts even though there's nothing obviously wrong. Even using his powers while he's human leaves him feeling a kind of horrible ache in his chest. He feels like he wants to cry every time he touches his ghostly core, but that's not the kind of thing he's ready to share yet. His friends are worried enough about him already, and besides, he's not sure he could tell them without breaking down completely.

"Besides, this whole day is supposed to be about getting back to normal, right?" he adds, but he knows he hesitated a little too long. His friends eye him suspiciously, but once again, they don't press it. There's nothing normal about today—on a "normal" day, Sam would force him to tell them what was wrong no matter how hard he tried to avoid it. "And normal teenagers don't have ghost powers."

"But using your powers is normal for you, Danny," says Sam softly, nervously, as if she has no right to badger him. Her violet eyes are filled with concern, with worry and with a touch of a fear for her best friend who seems so far gone now. Danny had been a half-ghost before he'd vanished, but it wasn't until he'd returned that Sam ever would have thought to describe him as ghostly.

For the first time since he's returned Danny looks carefully at his friends, really carefully. He didn't notice it before, but Sam's wearing very little makeup today, and instead of her usual stylish skirt and tank, she's wearing dark jeans and a tight black t-shirt that looks as if it was thrown on simply because those were the first clothes that her hands found upon waking. Even the laces and buckles on her boots aren't completely done up, and as he looks at her he can see that she has dark circles to match his own around her eyes. Her hair, normally at least partially up, is worn down, the locks sweeping about her face in a way that is very elegant yet also very un-Sam like.

Tucker hardly looks better. His shirt and pants are wrinkled and his beret looks like it was thrown on as an afterthought, and the same tell tale signs of exhaustion mar Tucker's face as clearly as they do Sam's. Although he never put as much effort into his personal style as Sam, Danny can't help but notice that Tucker's pockets seem to lack their characteristic bulges from his PDA and various other technological devices, and for Tucker, the self-proclaimed techno geek, to not have the very staples of his identity on his person . . . Silently Danny curses, berating himself for not paying enough attention to how much his confusion, his memory loss, and his strange disappearance is still affecting his friends. He needs to be normal for them, needs to try for their sake, because even if nothing feels right to him, even if he can't get that damn song out of his head, the one part of Danny that is still there is the hero-complex. Even if it hurts him to pretend to be normal, he thinks, Danny decides that he's going to act like the Danny they know and remember so they can stop suffering. So they can return to what, for them, is normal and happy, even as Danny doubts that he'll ever be able to get back to that state again.

"You're right, Sam," he says, smiling at her, and even though he knows that it's not quite reaching his eyes, it's a start. Danny's a master of acting, a master of switching masks mid-stride, and even though he's not quite back to himself yet, he knows that it won't be long before he can at least fool everyone into believing that he is. It hurts to lie to his friends this way, but it's not the first time he's pretended to be feeling better than he is for their sake. "Maybe . . . maybe tonight I'll go on patrol again, too."

"Seriously?" the pair gasps in unison, and he can see a faint light in their eyes: it's hope. Now he knows that must do it, must take up the hero's mantle even though the only thing he truly wants to do is go home and sleep tonight.

He grins. The glimmer of hope in their eyes has given him something, a small spark that maybe he can build upon to bring himself back to something at least a step above the bare half-existence he's living now. "Yeah. That's part of the routine, too, right? School, ghost hunting, more school, ghost hunting, lectures from the parents about responsibility, maybe a detention or two and a side of lack of sleep to go with it . . ."

"Not to mention there's that little added bonus of Paulina finally putting an end to her little drama queen act," grumbles Sam, nodding towards the A-list cheerleader who is currently dressing in all black rather than her signature pink. "She's been mourning Danny Phantom ever since you disappeared a month ago, and now half the school's dressed in black because of it! I'm barely recognizable as a goth anymore."

"And it's really stupid for them to be mourning him, since, y'know, everybody assumed that because he's a ghost Danny Phantom is already dead," adds Tucker, and then he winces, slightly. "I mean, we know you're not dead, dude, but—"

"—it's okay, Tuck," chuckles Danny, and this time he makes the smile appear to reach his baby blues even though inside he doesn't feel much like smiling at all. It's the masks, again, coming as naturally to him as breathing.

Or perhaps that's not an apt comparison, given that as a half-ghost, the breathing doesn't always come all that naturally to Danny.

"Um . . . nobody put it together, did they?" asks Danny nervously, rubbing the back of his neck, and his friends frown at him, not quite following the sudden change in the subject. "The whole Fenton and Phantom disappearing at the same time thing, I mean?"

"You mean did anybody figure out your secret?" clarifies Sam, and Danny nods, fidgeting slightly as he uneasily considers the possible consequences of what would happen if someone had managed to add up the clues. "No. I mean, that first week you were gone we covered it up for a few days so the timing between the two vanishing was a little different, and even though you've been back for a week now, it's not like anyone's seen Danny Phantom. Valerie's the only one that might be a little suspicious, but I don't think it's because she thinks you're the same person. I think she just believes that Phantom captured you or something."

For a moment Danny feels a kind of pain, as if Sam's words have brought some truth closer to the surface, but no matter how hard he tries to pull the memories out, nothing comes. Nothing but the damn song that he's sure he never heard before his disappearance and yet can't get out of his head, and for a brief instant, he finds himself beginning to hum it before he manages to stop himself. Even though the tune sounds cheerful enough, there's just something about it that hurts, that makes Danny want to cry every time he hums it aloud or hears it in his head, and he hopes that it'll leave him alone before it drives him mad.

"And your parents know the truth now," adds Tucker, "but that's just because we told them. Even they admitted that they never would've guessed the truth and your mom's smarter than just about anyone else in town."

"But totally blind when it comes to some obvious stuff, Tuck, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten away with the lie for so long," says Danny, for he can't shake the feeling that someone must have figured out his secret at last. It's just paranoia, of course, and he knows that, but knowing the truth about the foolishness of what one's feeling doesn't mean one can always stop feeling it.

"How are they handling it?" Sam asks gently, one of the more personal questions that she's been willing to put forth since Danny's return.

"They seem to be taking it pretty well," Danny answers, "but I think that's just because they're mostly happy that I'm still at least half-alive."

_At least they're acting like they're taking it well, _he thinks, but he doesn't say it to his friends. They don't need to know that his parents always eye him strangely now, or that they second guess everything they say around him, especially when they start talking about ghosts. They don't need to know about the little words and phrases that his parents use to talk about his powers and his ghost half as if it's a disease, phrases like "tainted with ectoplasm" or "curing Danny's ghost-half." They don't need to know, either, about how his parents flinch every time he goes ghost or uses one of his powers, even though he rarely does either anymore.

They don't need to know about how Danny is pretending like he never notices how hard his parents are taking the news about their son being a ghost, either, or how much it hurts Danny to play the role of the oblivious teenager. "That's good," says Sam, smiling at him. "I was worried that your dad would still want to rip you apart molecule by molecule."

"Nope. He says that he wants me to be his sidekick," Danny says, grinning, and it's true. His father did say that when Danny returned and he first learned the truth, but his mother and sister both insisted that Danny stop ghost hunting for a while. They worry about his safety since something obviously went horribly wrong once, and Danny understands. With how becoming a ghost feels lately, he even welcomes the excuse to shirk his responsibility.

"At least you have the matching jumpsuits," quips Sam, who's enjoying the turn in the conversation as much as the fact that Danny's participating in it.

"And I'm sure that your dad won't trap you in the thermos as many times as Jazz," adds Tucker cheerfully, and Danny shudders as he remembers his sister's lamentable ghost hunting abilities. "Dude, I can't believe how awful she is at it."

"She has gotten a little better," says Danny, defending his sister although he feels like he shouldn't since she really is a terrible ghost hunter. "At least I think she has. I still won't let her come near me with a thermos."

"Some people are just better suited to support roles," states Sam as they walk into their first period class together, and a chill runs through Danny as he sees his fellow classmates staring at him, whispering softly. The once invisible boy who used to sit near the back of the class and who was only notable for the number of times he went to the bathroom in a single day has become an instant celebrity with his three-week vanishing act, and although the teachers have all spoken to their students about behaving normally around Danny, his peers can't help themselves. The gossip spreading through the school and the whispers in the classroom as he moves towards his seat sounds like a dozen hissing snakes, and he desperately wants to run away before one decides to bite.

Of course, running away will only make it worse in the long run. As long as Danny acts normal, he knows that things will return to normal eventually. The stranger he behaves, the more fuel he adds to the gossip and rumors.

Sam touches his shoulder gently, offering him her support as she moves to take her seat behind him. Her touch causes a ripple of anxiety to run through Danny that he can't explain, but Danny appreciates the thought behind the gesture nevertheless. Tucker likewise smiles and gives him a slight nod, letting him know that he's there for his friend as well, and for a moment Danny feels as if he might be okay.

"So, Fenturd," comes a nasally voice off to his side as one of the snakes bites at last, and inwardly Danny cringes. He's forgotten that Dash is in his first period class, that the obnoxious football player and bully is in all of his classes, and taking a deep breath Danny focuses on the chalkboard, determined not to look at him. "Where've you been? Running across the country so you could get married to your boyfriend or something?"

The jock chuckles then, as if he's said something terribly clever, and his friends join in as well, their laughter sounding incredibly fake to the ears of a liar as skilled as Danny. "Just ignore him," urges Sam in his ear, as if he needs to be told, and Danny continues to stare at the chalkboard, gripping his pencil in his hand more tightly as Dash continues to speak.

"Come on, Fentonia," he presses, and everyone is watching now. No one will stop him. They're too afraid of Dash and too curious about what happened to Danny. "Seriously. What happened? Did some loser ghost kidnap you? Or were you just in the hospital finally getting that bladder problem of yours taken care of?"

"Shut it, Dash," growls Sam, making Danny smile genuinely for what might be one of the first times that day, for despite her warning to Danny for him to keep calm, she's snapped first.

"Or what, you stupid freak? You think you can take me, Manson?"

"Yeah, actually," she replies, jumping out of her seat with her fists clenched tightly by her sides, and there's a fire in those violet eyes that Danny has rarely seen outside a ghost fight or an animal rights protest, a fire that's so intense and pure that there's no way that someone as pathetic as Dash could stand to look at her without flinching. "I'm pretty sure I can handle an asshole like you."

As stupid as Dash is, Danny knows that he's absolutely certain of that simple fact, too: Sam stands a good chance of winning in a fight between them, and even if she isn't the victor, Dash will still look like a jerk if he fights her and wins because Sam is a girl. So instead of pushing it, he changes tactics and focuses back on Danny. It's the easy—and maybe the only—way out if the jock wants to save face. "I'm not gonna fight you, Manson. Besides, what kind of loser needs a girl to fight his battles for him? Are you that pathetic now, Fentina?"

"Danny's not pathetic!" shouts Sam at the same instant that Danny sighs heavily and says, "Yeah, actually. I guess I am."

"Danny, you shouldn't let that jerk call you pathetic just because he's a stupid muscle head that happens to be good at catching a stupid ball and running really fast," snaps Sam, not willing to let Danny sell himself short.

"Seriously, dude," agrees Tucker, but Danny ignores them, instead looking Dash straight in the eyes.

"But I am pathetic," Danny repeats in an eerily flat tone, much to his friend's dismay, and he's still staring straight at Dash in a way that he can tell makes the jock feel horribly uncomfortable, "and if you need to shove me into a locker or tease me to prove that, then go ahead. I just don't care anymore."

The whole class is silent, now, staring at him in shock, and Danny ignores them as he turns back to face the blackboard. He can feel their stares on him and sense that Dash and his friends want to say something but just don't know what that something is. After all, it's not normal for someone to think they're pathetic, but Danny does. He failed to do his duty, failed to protect the town, and failed to even keep a single memory of whatever it was that messed up his life and the lives of his family and friends for three weeks. In the end, however, they're saved having to come up with a response since Mr. Falluca walks into the classroom then and places his things on his desk. The teacher is about to tell them to be quiet, but then frowns when he realizes that he doesn't have to since the whole room is eerily silent.

Something is clearly wrong, but the teacher assumes correctly that it must have something to do with Danny and so pretends as if everything is normal, as if everything is fine, and hopes that it's the best way to cope with his class's odd behavior. "Good morning, students, and welcome back Mr. Fenton."

"Thanks, sir," Danny mumbles, the spell on the classroom broken, and he's sure that the welcome is more formality than truth. Most of his teachers dislike him—he was a troublemaker and a constant disruption to their classes thanks to the ghost fighting—and the only one who seems genuinely excited that he's back is Mr. Lancer. The old teacher actually stopped by the Fenton's house a few days after he heard that Danny had returned, and he's offered to help Danny in any way he can. It was an action that Danny found touching, if a bit strange since he assumed that Lancer despised him.

The moment that the teacher begins his lecture is the moment that Danny finds himself drifting again. Now that he does not need to wear a mask for his friends he finds he can stop trying to stay in touch, that he can stop trying to force himself to pretend as if everything is just fine or will be within a few days. Mr. Falluca may not like Danny much, but he leaves the boy alone when he calls on students to answer questions. He knows that Danny's reasons for attending school at the moment have more to do with socialization than with academics and that the boy is probably struggling to focus as is. From the far off expression in the boy's eyes and the stillness of the pencil in his hand, the teacher is certain he's right. He won't allow Danny to neglect his work forever, but for this week, at least, he knows that the best thing he can do is to leave the child be as he tries to recover some semblance of normalcy.

The lesson passes in a blink, and each class fades into the next. Danny is barely aware of the day passing by, and at lunch he forces himself to participate in the conversation even though he hasn't been paying enough attention in his classes to talk about school and isn't in the mood to talk about video games. By seventh period he feels completely exhausted, even though Danny knows he's done nothing and should feel fine, and he's counting down the minutes until the day finally ends. Surprisingly, his ghost sense hasn't gone off all day, but he assumes that it's because of the new defenses that his parents installed at the school after his disappearance, defenses that include a state of the art ghost shield that surrounds the school at all times. Such upgrades were expensive, but the parents of Amity Park were willing to pay for them if it meant keeping their kids safe, alive, and happy.

If it meant that their kids, in other words, would never vanish like Danny Fenton did.

Seventh period is English, and unlike his other teachers, Lancer doesn't give him a break. The middle aged man calls on Danny for answers, forces him to read one short passage from _As You Like It, _and assigns him a short essay to make up for the handful of assignments he's missed in the past month. When the class is over, Lancer insists that Danny stay for a moment so he can speak with him, and Danny flashes his friends a small smile to let them know that it's alright and that he'll be along shortly.

"Are you doing okay, Daniel?" asks Lancer gently when the last student departs.

"Until your class I was," admits Danny, but he smiles slightly as he speaks to let the teacher know he's mostly being sarcastic. "You went pretty hard on me today."

"You won't be able to get your life back to normal if I treat you as if you're made of glass and will break if I ask you a simple question or make you read from the text," Lancer replies calmly, but he can tell that the boy knows this, that Danny knew precisely what Lancer was doing and that Danny is well aware that Lancer has his best interests at heart. "Of course, if you think I'm being a little too hard on you already, then I can go a little easier on you tomorrow . . . "

Danny shakes his head quickly. "No, sir. It's okay. I get it, and . . . and I need it, I think. It kept me focused."

"Are you having trouble paying attention in your other classes?" asks the teacher, although he already knows the answer. He ate lunch in the teacher's lounge today, after all, and all the others could talk about was poor Daniel Fenton and how he seems so withdrawn and exhausted and how he should stay home another week if he needs a little more time to pull himself together.

"Yeah," says Danny, rubbing the back of his neck, and glancing at a chair in the front of the room and then at the clock he seems to be internally fighting with a decision. A moment later Lancer catches on, realizing what the boy wants.

"Do you want to talk?" Lancer asks, a bit surprised that the boy would wish to speak with him about anything, yet the light that appears in the boy's gaze confirms his suspicions: he _does _want to talk, to discuss something, and Mr. Lancer is touched that the boy would want to speak to him about something that likely has nothing to do with English or his other classes.

"Can we? I don't, um, want to keep you or anything," he stutters.

"Why don't you shut the door?" suggests Lancer, and Danny quickly hurries over and closes it before taking a seat at the front of the room. Grabbing his chair from behind his desk, Lancer moves it around to the front and flips it around so that he can rest his arms casually on the back of the chair as he talks to the boy. Danny quirks an eyebrow, surprised by the way his stiff teacher casually slouches in the chair, but says nothing for he assumes that the teacher must have read about "groovy" postures in a book somewhere. "So. How did today go, Mr. Fenton?"

The touch of formality in what is such an informal situation makes Danny smile. No matter how the man sits, he still speaks like an authority figure, like a teacher, but that's okay. It's what Danny needs right now: someone wise, someone confident, and someone knowledgeable. Someone who can give him advice without coddling him like his sister and parents and friends have been doing.

"Not great," Danny admits, sighing heavily, and he pauses before it all spills out, the words coming so rapidly that he barely has time to breathe as he speaks. "All day long I've been out of touch with everything and everyone. I've been trying to focus, but it's just so hard and the classes just don't seem to matter anymore. I can tell that the way I'm acting is upsetting Sam and Tucker and my family, though, so I keep trying to pretend like I'm okay and like everything's fine so they'll stop worrying and get back to normal, but that's just making it worse for me because it's so hard to act like everything's fine when it's just not. And I can't stop thinking about it, either. I mean, maybe it'd be easier if I knew what happened, but there's a three week long hole in my brain and the only reason I know I missed those weeks at all is because of the stuff that's changed like my family and friends and the dates on everything from the milk to my cell phone that insist I missed a whole bunch days or else that Technus is messing with satellites again and that the milk I the fridge went bad ages ago. And even though I can't actually remember anything, there are these moments when I feel like I can or when something stupid will make me feel upset or scared and I know that it's gotta have something to do with all the time I'm missing."

"It might not be for the best for you to pretend to be okay, Daniel, but if you feel that you must . . ." He eyes his student and Lancer can tell that they're no arguing with Daniel on this particular point. The boy will insist on wearing a mask of normalcy for his friends even as the weight of it crushes him, so Lancer changes tactics and focuses on something that perhaps the boy will be willing to do. "Have your parents talked about therapy or hypnosis to recover the memories?"

"Yeah," the boy says, his eyes darting away uncomfortably as he shifts behind the desk, "but, um, after that whole thing with Spectra, I don't really want to go see a therapist. She kind of just made me feel a lot worse about myself instead of better."

"I agree that Ms. Spectra was not exactly what we hoped she would be," says Lancer, refusing to completely admit that he made a mistake when he hired the woman, "but sometimes even a good therapist will force you to feel something bad before you can get better. And it sounds like what you really want—what you really need, perhaps—is to remember what happened to you in order to get back to normal. If you can't remember on your own or haven't yet, then a therapist may be the only person who can help you do so since the experience was likely extremely traumatic."

"Maybe," he mutters, unconvinced. There are others, the boy knows, that may be able to help him remember. He just assumes that those others will not be willing. "But I'm kinda worried about remembering."

"Oh?"

"I . . . I can't remember where I was or what happened," Danny explains, softly, "but I when I try to remember what actually happened, I realize that I still remember how whatever happened to me _felt_."

Lancer waits a moment, expecting the boy to continue, but Danny's blue eyes seem to become as empty as the sky as he stares down at the floor. Just as Lancer is about to ask, though, the life comes back to those eyes like stars appearing in the night, although the expression that Danny wears is still dark and haunted. "There's this feeling, like this cold feeling that's like . . ." _Like going ghost_, Danny wants to say, but he doesn't. His secret is too precious to tell everyone, even if he feels at the moment that he can trust the old teacher with anything. "Like I'm being dipped head to toe in a frozen lake. And there's this fear, too, and a kind of pain when I try to remember . . ." He places a hand on his chest, his eyes closing slightly as he thinks about it and winces, his fingers clutching his shirt for a brief second before the boy forces them to relax. "And other feelings, too, but none that are good. There's this fear, and then sadness and anger and pain and frustration. Mostly there's just the pain, though. Some of it feels like it's just physical, but some of it . . . it's like the worst thing that could have happened did happen and I just can't remember it, but I _know_ that's not what happened."

"Oh?" Mr. Lancer frowns at him, wondering how he can be so certain. "And what do you believe to be the worst thing that could ever happen to you is?"

There are two things, actually, that Danny thinks of then, and one is a future that he's already seen before, or a past that never was depending on how one prefers to look at it. A future in which his whole family is killed in an awful accident, and the pain is too much for him to bear and so consumes him and turns him into a monster.

Yet his family is still alive, as Danny will see the moment he goes home, so he knows that isn't it.

The other is that his parents reject him upon learning the truth of who and what he is, or even worse, that they dissect him and rip him apart, but this one is not true, either. His parents know the truth, and though they seem uneasy there is nothing to suggest in their actions or Jazz's that they have ever hurt him or ripped him apart on a laboratory table. They learned his secret from his friends, and there is nothing in the lab that suggests that anything awful happened there, either, for Danny has checked, and his friends had already told him that they checked his parent's basement when he vanished to make sure that he was not trapped there by them. This isn't, however, a fear that he can tell Lancer, so instead he returns to the first.

"My family dying is the worst thing I can think of ever happening," says Danny, knowing that he can't say any more. "But obviously that's not it."

"No, it's not," agrees Lancer, who's a bit surprised by the boy's response. It's not merely that the boy's worst fear is the loss of his family—even amongst teenagers, the potential loss of their family is a powerful and frightening concept—so much as the expression Danny wears as he says it, as if he actually _knows _just how terrible such a loss would be.

Yet the way the boy describes what he's feeling sounds like something else to Lancer, something that in its own way may be just as terrible. "I wonder, Mr. Fenton, if someone hurt you," says Lancer softly, and Danny's eyes snap up, going wide for a moment before the shock seems to vanish.

"I can't—I mean—who would—why?" he stutters uselessly, fearing that maybe he's so messed up that he actually spoke his former thoughts aloud.

"Your parents are the town's—if not the country's—foremost ghost experts. They may not be the best hunters, but they're brilliant and have made more than a few inventions that have made the lives of many ghosts rather miserable," Mr. Lancer tells him slowly, and there's something about this theory that sounds right to him, that sounds plausible. "Perhaps, Mr. Fenton, one captured you and tortured you in the hopes of gaining some information about them, or to make your parents suffer. Such an experience would undoubtedly be traumatic, and it would explain why you've become so jumpy and withdrawn."

He can see the boy considering this, but what Lancer doesn't know is that Danny is also aware that a ghost may have done just that because of his alter ego as well. Most of the humans might be oblivious that Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom are one and the same, but most of the ghosts are not. It would not be impossible for one of them to capture him and torture him for pleasure . . . To make his life a living hell. Perhaps it wasn't a ghost, either. Maybe it was the Guys in White or some other ghost hunting human who finally learned his secret and decided to figure out what made him tick by ripping him apart, molecule by molecule. "Maybe," says Danny slowly, for something about the idea sounds right and resonates within him, yet at the same time he knows instinctively that it's not quite right.

"Whatever the case might be, though," says Lancer, who notices the two students anxiously glancing into his door for what is probably not the first time, "I think that you need to do whatever you can to try and recover those memories since I doubt you'll be able to move on until you do. Therapy is probably the best strategy, Daniel. A good therapist would be able to guide you slowly through it and help you recover the memories in stages so it wouldn't be too traumatic. Our guidance office has the names of a few excellent specialists."

Danny nods, considering Lancer's words. He knows that the teacher is probably right, but he's not sure he's willing to do this slowly, to wait until it happens piece by piece, and fortunately for Danny, he may not have to do so. After all, at home waits his own personal therapist, one whom he knows can do a little hypnosis and might be able to help him recover his lost memories quickly . . .

"I'll think about it," he says to Lancer, though, as noncommittal as ever, and Lancer smiles since he's fairly certain that he knows exactly what Daniel's planning to do. _At least he's going to talk to someone, _he thinks, and although he feels that it would be better if Danny talked to someone that was not his sister, he knows that beggars can't be choosers. He wants his student to recover and to regain some semblance of normalcy from this broken life he's now living.

"Very well, Mr. Fenton," he sighs, slowly getting up to his feet, and he feels a dull ache in his lower back as he rises, a sure sign he's getting old. "Your friends seem to be a bit concerned about you, so perhaps it's best you got going for today," he tells him, jerking a thumb at the door, and Danny looks just in time to see a distinctive red beret vanish out of sight. He smiles slightly, picturing the nervous look on Tucker's face at the thought of being spotted by Lancer while spying on the pair of them. "If you need any help, though, please let me know."

"Okay," he agrees, grabbing his things, and heading out the door of the classroom he finds that he feels a little better even though he's hardly said anything at all and knows nothing more of what happened to him than he did before.

Yet at least now he has a plan to figure it out, and some hope, and it's enough to make the smile he gives his friends the brightest it's been all day. If only that song would just go away, too.

**A/N: So this story probably won't be extremely long—just a handful of chapters unless I realize I want to do something else in the middle, but that seems unlikely. I'm ninety-nine percent certain that I know exactly where I want this to go. A couple of things about it, though. First, it's pretty serious and pretty dark. It might not seem that way at first, but the ending is . . . yeah. Rated 'T' for a reason, people. **

**Second, it's written in present tense. I normally don't write that way—up until now I've preferred to use the past tense—but I wanted to experiment with it after reading the **_**Hunger Games, so**_** there might be a couple of unintentional tense shifts in there as well as some seriously awkward phrasing. If I happen to miss it when I edit, then I apologize. I'm going to try really hard not to do so.**

**Third, I do admit that I feel as if this first chapter dragged a bit and ended a smidge awkwardly. It should pick up in the next chapter, though, and I honestly just ended it there because, well, I needed to end it. A terrible reason, but there you have it.**

**Fourth . . . eh, maybe there isn't a fourth. Oh, wait, I lied. Review, please! Reviews will make me a better writer (or so I hope), so for your sake and for mine, please click on that button and drop me a line. Even a short, nice review is good because it's nice to get some positive feedback, but I definitely welcome serious/negative critiques as well.  
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	2. Chapter 2:  Going Ghost

**Chapter Two: Going Ghost**

"You want me to what?" repeats Jazz incredulously. Sitting at her desk with a pencil in hand as she pretends to do her homework (for she's really focused completely on her younger brother, but she's trying hard to convince him that she's not obsessing over him at the moment in the hopes that it'll put him more at ease while he talks to her), the redheaded girl cannot believe the words her younger brother has just uttered.

"I want you to hypnotize me," he states again, glancing at the door. His friends are waiting for him in his room at the moment. He hasn't told them what he has in mind, mostly because Danny knows that Sam and Tucker will not approve of what he's considering; instead, Danny has simply told his friends that he's trying to get Jazz to convince his mom to let him go ghost hunting again. "Please, Jazz? I need to know what happened."

"Danny . . . I'm not really qualified to do something like that," she tells him slowly. "I mean, I've studied hypnosis and read about the techniques, but . . . I'm really just a beginner, and whatever you went through is serious. I could hurt you."

Danny stares at her in shock, amazed that his brainy older sister is sitting there telling him that she is incapable of doing something, that she is not the best at whatever she might happen to set her mind to. He believes, after all, that Jazz thinks she can do anything, that she believes that she is just as good as anyone else and just as smart as any psychologist currently working in the field, but apparently he's misjudged her. Jazz is by far more aware of her limits than he realized, which means that this is just going to be that much harder. "But Jazz, I can't go to a regular therapist," he says, slowly trying to work out some way to convince her to do this, and it comes to him in a flash of inspiration. "I mean, a hypnotist can't see me because they could end up figuring out that I'm Danny Phantom if I said something stupid while I was under."

"I know that, Danny, but you shouldn't even be _considering_ hypnosis," Jazz argues, and now all of her attempts at pretending to be doing her homework are forgotten as she tosses the pencil irritably down onto her desk and looks her younger brother in the eye. "Whatever you experienced was so traumatic that you've repressed several weeks' worth of memories, and if you tried to use some quick method to recover those memories then you could do even more damage to your psyche! I won't be responsible for that. You really just need to go see a real therapist, Danny, and work towards recovering those memories slowly."

"Jazz, I don't want to go to a regular therapist," growls Danny, his frustration increasing. Even if Jazz is nervous about doing it, he was so sure that she would cave just because she wouldn't want to upset him further or make things harder on him. Instead, though, his sister is showing her infamous stubborn side, and Danny just can't focus well enough right now to do anything but uselessly snap back. "You always tell me that therapy's about being honest with yourself or whatever, and I _can't _be honest with some psychiatrist that I've never even met before and who might sell me off to the GIW or something if they find out what I am!"

"I know that, Danny!" she cries bitterly, completely losing her cool, and then she takes a deep breath as she tries to force herself to stay calm and think things through rationally. After all, that's who Jazz is: logical, calm, the one who works out the solutions to the impossible problems. Yet she's also the one whose emotions tend to blind her when it comes to keeping her baby brother safe, and she knows that letting those emotions cloud her judgment won't help her right now. She needs to offer him something, to bargain with him, but she's just not sure exactly where the middle ground lies, or if she really thinks she can actually help him anymore. "I just don't trust myself to help you anymore after what happened, little brother."

It dawns on Danny, then, what brought on the change in his sister, and the anger leaves him as quickly as it came. "Jazz, you can't seriously be doubting yourself now because of what happened to me. There was nothing you or anyone else could do."

"But you don't know that for sure, Danny, since you don't know what happened anymore than we do," she sighs.

"I know enough to realize that nothing would've happened to me if you'd been there, which means that there probably wasn't anything you could've done differently that day to stop, well, whatever it was that happened. Besides, Jazz, not being able to save me from a ghost or something isn't the same as a therapy session. You're great at this psychology stuff, and for the first time ever, I'm coming in here and actually _asking _you to use it on me," Danny jokes. "You ought to be jumping at the chance, not fleeing across the state."

Jazz pauses, knowing that he's right. Psychology is her specialty. It's the one thing she's always been able to offer Team Phantom, and this is the first time that her brother's really been willing to take advantage of it. "I just . . . I don't know, Danny . . ."

"If you won't do it, Jazz, then I'm just going to run off and find Desiree and wish to have my memories back or something stupid like that," threatens Danny. "If you think hypnosis will be bad, how awful do you think that'll be? She'll probably twist my wish somehow, too, just to make it worse."

"And you'd still go and see her, even knowing that?" asks Jazz uneasily, and there is no hesitation in Danny's response.

"Yeah, I will. I need to know what happened to me, Jazz. This not knowing is tearing me apart," he whispers, his voice trembling as he stares down at his feet. His fingers are clenching his jeans as he speaks, the tension in his body radiating off him in waves, and it's then that Jazz knows that regardless of how uncomfortable she is with this whole situation, she has to do something to help him. Walking over to her younger brother, she gently puts an arm around him. She intends for the gesture to be supportive and Danny knows this, yet he still flinches automatically when she touches him. "Sorry," he mumbles, almost incoherently.

"It's okay, Danny . . . but if you're willing to go that far, then how about we make a deal?" she suggests quietly, trying not to show her concern over how her brother reacted to her gentle touch. "For three weeks, we'll do this my way. We'll work towards slowly recovering your memories and doing whatever we can in the way that I think is the best for your mental health. If by the end of three weeks we've gotten nowhere, then I'll try to hypnotize you, okay? Even if you want me to do it, I'm still going to need time to learn more about it before I'll even feel a little comfortable trying it on you, because, well, I'm not even sure I'm even comfortable just acting as your therapist without the hypnosis. So three weeks. That's all I'm asking you for, little brother."

Danny closes his eyes as he considers it. Three weeks is a painfully long time from where he stands now, both because it's precisely how much time he's missing and because he knows that he's already falling apart. Yet there is no one else, and Danny knows that seeking the aid of an enemy like Desiree is beyond foolish. As much as he wishes he can convince Jazz to simply try it now, he knows he cannot. His sister might be the only person he knows that is more stubborn than himself or Vlad. "Okay, Jazz. I'll wait, but whether or not we've made real progress with recovering my memories is up to me, not you, got it?"

"I . . . okay, Danny," she agrees reluctantly, for she knows that where a therapist might see signs of progress their patient might not notice at all, but there is no other alternative that she can currently see. At the very least, she's bought herself more time to come up with a better solution to Danny's problem.

"Good. And just one more thing, too . . ." he says slowly, for he doesn't really want to make the next request but knows that he has to for his friends' sake. "If I agree to do things your way for now, then do you think you can convince mom to let me go on patrol tonight?"

For a moment Danny thinks that she'll refuse, but instead his sister smiles at him. "You want to go on patrol?"

"That's normal for me, right?" he asks with a grin, his tone teasing and as light-hearted as he can make it right now. After all, Danny has no desire to go on patrol. Going on patrol means going ghost, and going ghost right now is still so unpleasant, so awful . . . Yet he reminds himself again that he must overcome his anxiety, that he must do so for his friend's sake, if nothing else.

"Okay, Danny. Deal. I'll convince mom. Just make sure that if you have any trouble, you call me, okay?" she pleads.

"Why would I call you? You'll just end up sucking me into the thermos, Jazz," says Danny, and even though he smiles like he's teasing her, there's a harsh, cold edge to his voice that he wishes he could take back. He sees a brief flash of pain in his sister's eyes, his honest words wounding his proud older sister who's already suffering from a severe loss of confidence right now, and he looks down at his feet as he waits for the awful moment to pass.

"Just the same," she says coolly as she walks out the door to go talk to their mom, and sighing heavily at how tactless he can be Danny gets to his own feet to go back to his friends. As he heads to his room, he can hear Tucker and Sam talking to each other. He's tempted to listen in on their conversation, but after hurting one person he cares about, he doesn't want to hurt another by getting angry because he ends up hearing something he might not like about himself from the mouths of his friends. After all, just because Danny knows he's not doing well doesn't mean he wants to hear them discussing it. He wants to believe that his masks are doing the trick, that they're reassuring Sam and Tucker and the others, because if they're not then all of his acting is worse than meaningless.

"Jazz says she'll do it," he declares as he opens the door, and the pair flash him a set of brilliant smiles that make his somewhat dreary room and mood a little brighter. "But in return, I have to let her play the therapist with me."

"You're going to let your sister get inside your head?" states Tucker, and he shudders overdramatically. "Ick, man, that's kind of creepy."

"It's not like I'm going to be telling her my secret fantasies and daydreams, Tuck," Danny replies, shrugging it off, but he's unable to help glancing at Sam, the source and center of many of those secret dreams, before continuing. "She's just going to help me remember what happened."

"Are you sure that you really want to do that, Danny?" Sam asks uneasily. "I mean, whatever happened . . . Lancer's right. It's probably really awful."

"So you heard that part, huh?" smirks the raven-haired boy, and Sam and Tucker exchange guilty looks. "It's okay. I think I need to figure it out so I can move past it, and besides, what if something really important happened? What if I'm not actually forgetting something traumatic but something that's a part of some evil plot that Vlad or someone cooked up and is trying to hide by wiping out my memory?"

"That seems kinda farfetched, dude," says Tucker.

"Is it anymore farfetched than me ending up with ghost powers, or vanishing and then turning up three weeks later with all my memories of that time magically missing from my head?" argues Danny.

"It could be both, too," adds Sam. "Maybe someone did something awful to you and maybe there's also some sort of villainous plot afoot."

Danny and Tucker flash each other matching grins. "Did you seriously just say 'villainous plot afoot?'" snickers Tucker. "I mean, jeez, Sam, what is this, _Scooby Doo_?"

"I just—ugh—go ahead, laugh it up, Tuck," she grumbles, rolling her eyes as he laughs hysterically at her expense, and even Danny chuckles a little. It strikes him that it's a little morbid to be laughing about something that at heart is actually pretty serious, but he can't help himself, and apparently, neither can Tucker. "But come on, haven't either of you two realized that our lives more closely resemble a weird cartoon at times?"

Although Tucker keeps on chuckling, Danny's laughter quickly dies with Sam's words. "You really believe that?" he asks, for although he admits that his life has had some similarity to a bad superhero comic or tv show, the bruises, the scrapes, the cuts, the sleepless nights, the disappointed looks on his parents' faces, not to mention the horrific nightmares that he has when he does sleep . . . It's a reality that's always been harshly tangible for Danny, even as that reality has apparently been lost on his friends. Then again, Danny knows that's at least partly his fault. He's been protecting them from the worst of it for a long time. Every time he shrugs off an injury that leaves him feeling crippled for days, his friends just assume that he's invincible. Every close fight he has, every near loss that he waves away as if it was nothing makes his friends look upon at him like he's the ultimate superhuman, when the truth is that he's just not superhuman enough. And while it's true that Danny is made of stronger stuff than the average human, at the end of the day, he really is nothing more than a scared teenage boy buried beneath all that armor.

"Sometimes," she admits, not sure why Danny's upset about it, but he's saved from her questions by a knock on the door.

"Come in," he calls, assuming it's his mom and Jazz, and sure enough, the two red heads walk into the room, his mother standing there in her blue jumpsuit. She looks a bit troubled, and there's that uncertain, nervous look in her eyes as she stares at her son that Danny's become all too familiar with. Danny can't help but wonder if it will ever leave his mother's eyes.

"Sweetie," she begins, and the endearment sounds strained, as if it's still hard for her to look upon her half-ghost son with the same love she felt for him before, "your sister said that you wanted to go on patrol tonight."

"Um . . . yeah," he says slowly, and he's practically begging her with his eyes to say no. If she tells him he can't go, then that's that. He won't have to go ghost. He won't have to feel that awful, horrible, sickly sensation . . .

"I don't think you should go tonight," she begins, and Danny resists the urge to let out the breath that he started holding when she first came into his room. "I . . . Your father and I think that we should have you run through a couple of tests first."

"Tests?" he squeaks, for the mere thought of being tested by his parents terrifies him. It's simply too close to his nightmares about being captured by them and experimented on or vivisected, of being trapped beneath a knife in his mother's hand while she cuts him open no matter how much he screams and cries that he's her son and begs her to stop. Although he knows he shouldn't be so scared, he can't keep his voice from trembling as he asks, "What kinds of tests?"

"They're worried about what happened to you, Danny," explains Jazz, who is well aware of her brother's old nightmare. "Whatever you went through may have affected your ghost powers, and they just want to make sure that they work okay before you go out and put yourself in danger like that."

_So she still wants me to go ghost, _he thinks, his stomach clenching. It's the last thing that he wants, but he tells himself once again that it's his duty and that he must do it, and that's all of the self-encouragement he needs. "Do you just want me to run through the obstacle course we set up in the lab?" Danny asks.

"You set up a course?"

"Yeah," he replies, looking to Sam and Tucker for support. Not for the first time Danny feels fortunate to have two extremely loyal friends sitting by his side. "We figured it was a good way to track the development of my powers and for me to get in some more practice."

"So you have records of your test results, then?" she asks curiously, the scientist in her clearly coming to the surface, and Danny nods. "That could provide a good baseline depending on how controlled the course is and how well your friends kept records."

"We're pretty good at it, Mrs. Fenton," chimes Tucker. "I mean, no offense to Danny, but Sam and I are the smart ones in this trio."

"Hey! It's not my fault that I don't have time to study!" he grumbles, forcing himself to smile and take back on the weight of that damn mask, but he's already so tired. It's only been a day, yet Danny can barely handle it anymore. He wonders how he ever used to be able to bear its weight before his disappearance, and how much longer it'll be before that fragile mask slips and tumbles to the ground, only to smash to pieces with no hope of ever being put back together again.

"No amount of studying would stop you from being so clueless, though," adds Sam. "Trust me, Mrs. Fenton. Tucker's right. Our results are good, or at least, they're good enough for you to figure out if Danny's powers are working okay or not. Come to think of it, I haven't actually seen him use any all day."

"I was trying to be normal, remember?" he says, for he doesn't want them to know the truth, and even though he doesn't want to, he makes his right hand invisible. "There? Happy?"

His mother gasps, still not accustomed to seeing displays of her son's power, but his friends and Jazz seem relatively unfazed and unconvinced. Each one seems to suspect that he's hiding something, but not one is sure just what that is. The feeling of his hand being invisible like that makes Danny feel deeply uneasy, and for some reason, the song that's been stuck in his head all day long seems to grow louder with the display. Before he loses touch, Danny brings his hand back into the visible spectrum, only then allowing himself to look at his mother's face again. He can't bear to look in her eyes when he uses his powers—there's never anything there except for fear, guilt, and pain.

Just once he wishes he could see the pride and acceptance he'd always hoped would be there before they learned the truth and reality proved otherwise.

"Are . . . Are you sure you're okay with doing this, Danny?" asks Jazz quietly. "It's fine if you're not. You shouldn't feel like you have to go on patrol or anything. The other ghost hunters in town can handle it."

"I'm sure, Jazz," he lies, pushing past his mother and his sister to the hallway, and he glances back impatiently. "Come on. I'll show you the course and run through it for you. Sam and Tucker can record my results and show you the files where we've been keeping records on everything."

Without actually waiting to see if they'll follow, he heads down towards the lab, and sure enough his friends and family aren't far behind. While they walk behind him, he lets his face relax at last, lets himself lose touch for just a moment. It's both a relief and a burden, for he knows that every time he puts down the mask it just gets harder to put back on, but he needs these moments, these brief instances where he simply lets himself be, and absentmindedly he finds himself almost inaudibly humming the first part of the song. Maybe this time if he hums the entire song then he'll stop hearing it, but he doubts it. He's tried it before when he can't sleep at night, yet the song is still there, echoing in his head.

As he comes to the top of the stairs to the lab, he feels a twinge of unease, but that's nothing new. Although he pretends otherwise, the lab has made him nervous ever since his accident, for Danny knows how easily the accident that made him a half-ghost could have killed him instead that day. It's also the place that reminds him constantly of how different he is, of his strange existence as a not quite dead, not quite living being, and of how the only other person who might be able to understand what such an existence is like is hell-bent on destroying his father and marrying his mother.

His footsteps echo softly on the laboratory stairs as the green glow of the portal comes into sight, and his father's bright-orange haz-mat suit clashes horribly against it as he stands in front of the doors, frowning, before slamming them back into place just by touching the tiny DNA scanner beside it. "Is something wrong?" wonders Danny as he enters the lab, and his father, glancing up at him, forces a smile onto his face as he responds.

"No, no, Danny-boy, the portal's working fine, but it does seem to be giving off a 0.0005 percent increase in power over the last hour," his father explains. "I was checking the power levels with the doors opened, too, to see if the readings were any different. Did you need something, son?"

"He wants to go on patrol tonight, Jack," explains Maddie as she enters, and the fake smile fades from his face as he regards his son with something akin to disbelief.

"Patrol?" he repeats as the others enter the lab. "But we haven't checked out his ghost half yet, and—"

"—I know, dear," she interrupts, "and I told him that. He insisted that we come downstairs and run some obstacle course that he and his friends set up in the lab as a way to test him."

_I don't remember insisting we do anything like that, _thinks Danny, scowling faintly. He much rather would have preferred hiding in his room and pretending to do homework to going ghost, but all of his attempts to weasel out of his earlier promise have failed spectacularly and he doesn't have the energy to try putting it off any longer.

"You guys set up a training course?" exclaims Jack, his eyes full of childlike glee. "I can't believe we never noticed it before!"

"We worked really hard to hide it," explains Sam as she moves over to a dusty desk and grabs a hidden control out from beneath it. "Tucker's the one who did the wiring for it, and Danny and I just built the rest."

"That's actually rather impressive," compliments Maddie as Sam presses a button and parts of the course emerge from the walls. "Are you ready, Danny?"

"No," he mumbles, only realizing that he said it aloud when he sees them staring at him, and rubbing the back of his neck he rapidly spits out the first excuse he can think of. "I mean, I have to transform first . . . I just wanted to warn you guys so you wouldn't, you know, get too freaked out or anything."

Maddie smiles gently at him. "It's okay, sweetie. Whenever you're ready."

"Guys?" he asks, glancing at his friends, but the two of them are already prepared. Tucker holds his PDA in hand, while Sam stands ready with the radar gun in one hand and the control in the other. Taking a deep breath, Danny closes his eyes and lets the rings wash over him. Although he hopes that maybe this time it won't be so bad, it's still almost as awful as it was when he last tried to go ghost several days ago. The pain in his chest is still there, ever present, as if his heart and lungs are now made of lead, and there's a dark, unpleasant feeling that seems to ripple through him every time one of his friends or family members looks at him. Chancing a glance at his mom and dad, Danny wants to cry when he notices that although his parents are looking at him with smiles on their faces, the expressions are no more genuine than most of the ones that Danny has worn today. They're still uneasy. Afraid. Guilt-ridden.

But just like his parents, Danny is doing his best to mask his feelings, too, and so he flashes them an equally, insincere smile. "Ready when you guys are, Sam."

"Ready . . . Go!" she exclaims, and Danny runs through the course as best he can, for he expects to stumble and fail at every turn. To his shock, however, he finds that most of it isn't so bad. The course occupies every inch of his mind, even that part which feels so heavy right now, and using his powers to blast away fake targets feels cathartic somehow. He feels as if he's back to himself and living the life he had before he vanished. Fighting ghosts and defending the town was such a central part to his being that Danny begins to think that going on patrol might actually be a brilliant idea.

The moment the course is over, however, Danny notices that the pain has returned, as has the nearly overwhelming haze and chills. "You haven't been using your ice powers much, have you?" asks Sam, noticing a tremor run through him, but Danny knows that's not it. These chills are something else entirely—they're goose bumps, and an old saying about how having a sudden, inexplicable chill is akin to someone walking over his grave almost makes Danny chuckle. Someone is definitely walking over his grave, all right, for if the lab isn't the closest thing to a tomb he has, then what is?

"Probably not," he lies. He doesn't want to worry her. "I just need to go out and kick a little ghost butt on a daily basis again and I'll be fine."

"Well, you're doing pretty well, although you seem a little slower and stiffer than usual," comments Jazz as she looks over at the readings.

"I'm just out of practice," Danny says, waving it off as he shifts back into his human form, and the sudden light makes his parents flinch. They're still not used to it, but it's okay. His friends weren't at first either, and Danny tells himself that eventually his parents will be. They have to be, after all, since they are his family, and right now Danny's just dealing with too much to believe otherwise. "A couple of fights and I'll be back to normal in no time."

_Hopefully_, he adds mentally, for although he pretends to be sure, he's not half as optimistic as he sounds. "I'm still not sure I want to let you go, sweetie," his mother sighs. "I'm just . . . what if something happens again?"

"I'll be careful," he promises, "and if you and dad want, you can come along and watch my back." He knows that offering to let them join him will only serve to reassure his parents—his father's aim is so awful and his hunting skills so lamentable that only Jazz might be worse, to the point where having his dad watch his back might be more dangerous than any ghost fight. "And Sam and Tucker will be there, too."

"But—"

"—mom, I'm not saying I'm going to go run off and fight a ghost on my own," says Danny quickly. "I know that something like that is probably what got me into this whole mess in the first place. Until I get my memories back, I won't fight ghosts except on patrols, and I won't go on patrols without someone with me."

"He'll be fine, Mrs. Fenton," assures Sam. "We've done this loads of times, and we know that nothing happened to Danny while we were with him. Whatever it was, someone clearly wanted to keep it a secret and caught him when he was out alone."

"You think someone erased his memories on purpose?" his dad asks curiously. "But who the heck would be strong enough to do something like that?"

"It's not necessarily someone strong, Mr. Fenton," Tucker explains. "I mean, even a ghost as pathetic as Desiree could if someone just made the right wish."

Danny's eyes light up at Tucker's explanation, for he hasn't even considered the wishing ghost or his other more pathetic enemies as the potential cause behind his memory loss. He just assumes that it was something trauma induced, since that's what his sister and friends are thinking as well, but maybe his other instinct is right. Maybe one of his enemies did mess with his head. "We should go look for her, Tuck," says Danny, briefly forgetting that his parents are there and that neither one will agree to let their son run head first into trouble. "Because if you're right and she's responsible for this, then she'll have to tell me that if I wish for her to tell me the truth!"

"That sounds like a horrible idea," Sam says even before either of his parents can argue against it. "Desiree will just twist whatever you wish for into something that'll suit her own purposes, Danny. Maybe she'll tell you the truth about having your memories erased but lie about who did it or something."

"And I don't think that's why you have no memories, Danny," Jazz adds softly, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"But maybe—"

"—I don't think that's it either, dude," interrupts Tucker. "Remember when Sam wiped your memories of the two of you meeting each other because of that screwed up wish with Desiree? You two were literally strangers—there was nothing there, no feeling, and nothing to remind you of all the times we'd shared together, but this time . . . you were pretty messed up afterward, and, well . . ."

"What?"

"No matter how hard you try to hide it, we can tell that something about it keeps nagging you," says Sam reluctantly. "I mean, you seemed okay today—" Danny fights down the relief that almost floods his expression, then, for if she actually believes he was okay today then that means his masks are working for them "—but up until now you've been kind of a wreck."

"And going after some ghost like that could be dangerous, Danny," his mother adds, finally managing to say what she's wanted to since the moment he proposed the idea. "Your powers might seem to be working okay right now, but there's no guarantee that they won't malfunction in an actual fight. So try patrolling tomorrow first and just make sure you can get through that. Please, Danny? I know you're impatient, but don't rush things."

Closing his eyes, Danny lets out a slow breath. "Yeah, I know. I guess it just would've made this whole thing easier if someone had brainwashed me," he grumbles sarcastically, and then he looks down at his feet as he speaks one of the most honest things he will have said all day. "I just wish I knew what happened to me."

"It's okay, Danny," says Jazz gently, throwing an arm around him as she guides him back up the stairs, and for the first time Danny manages not to flinch when someone touches him even though a part of him still desperately wants to fling her arm away. "We'll figure it out. I promise."

**A/N: First things first: thanks for all of the reviews! I know I responded to most of them, but there were a couple of people who I couldn't answer so for those of you who never got a response from me, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciated it a lot.  
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**As far as the story itself, I felt that this chapter was a little bit slow, at least in my opinion, but it was kind of necessary, so I'm not going to apologize for it very much (at all) . . . At any rate, I promise that it picks up in the next chapter. I actually already have most of Chapter Three done and edited, so I'm tempted to update a bit earlier than usual, but I'm almost worried that I might've hit the ground running a little too fast in that one and thrown the pacing completely out of whack, so hmm . . . I guess I'll have to think on it a bit more. I actually struggled a lot with that whole dialogue between Jazz and Danny in the beginning of this chapter, too, which is frustrating for me since dialogue's the one part that usually comes naturally to me when I write (the details in between? Much less so). I'm still not entirely thrilled with it, but I'm not going to make myself any crazier trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but . . . yeah. Not today.  
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**Naturally, I'm curious as to whether or not anyone has any guesses about what happened to Danny yet, so if you review, I'd love it if you'd tell me what you're thinking and whether or not the answer to the mystery is as obvious as I think it's become. Of course, I _know _where it's going, so I may just have the hindsight thing working for me right now as I go through this, and** **t****o be fair, I probably won't tell you if you're right** **or wrong**. . . **but still. I'd love to hear your guesses.  
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**Any other general comments/critiques (positive, negative, or otherwise) that you guys have are definitely welcome, of course, so if you have the time, then please leave a review. Even short reviews with a quick "That was great!" are enough to inspire me to write a little faster and try a little harder every time, so I'd really appreciate it.**

**Until next time! :)**


	3. Chapter 3:  When You Wish Upon a Star

**Chapter Three: When You Wish Upon a Star, Sometimes It Does Make a Difference Who You Are**

Awaking with a start, Danny glances at his clock as he snaps up in bed. It's only three a.m., and after taking a long, deep breath he flops back down, wiping the sweat dripping down his brow with the back of his hand even as he shivers from the cold. He's pretty sure he didn't scream in his sleep—after all, his sister isn't standing in the doorway right now, and neither are his parents—yet he knows he had nothing but nightmares. Desperately he wishes he could recall them, yet the only thing he remembers from his dreams is feeling a horrible pain in his chest and something cold against his back.

As he lies awake in bed, a puff of cold air escapes from his mouth, his ghost sense fogging the air for a moment. Although he knows that he promised his mother mere hours ago that he would not fight ghosts without a team of allies behind him, Danny finds himself shifting forms and flying through his window as he quietly hums the song that is still stuck in his head. Although it hurts, Danny forces himself to ignore the pain that seems to flow through his ghost form as he goes outside to face the threat.

And much to Danny's surprise, the ghost floating through the city is the very ghost he was desperately hoping to see, no matter what he told his friends and family earlier.

Desiree.

"I wish that I knew the truth about what happened to me during those three weeks I was missing!" he declares loudly when he's mere feet away from her, and the wishing ghost jerks in surprise as she twists about to face him, already starting in on her catch-phrase.

"So you have wished it, so shall it—oh, it's you," she pauses when she finally realizes just who made the wish, and a strange smirk appears on her lips. "Unfortunately for you, young Phantom, I don't have to grant your wishes anymore."

"What?" he sputters, his green eyes widening in surprise. "But—but you grant every wish you hear! That's, like, your whole thing!"

"Except yours, now," she chuckles. "Someone else wished that I would stop granting the wishes of you and those pesky little friends of yours. Oh, and your family. Just about every person who knows your secret can no longer ask me to grant your wishes, so don't think you can just suck me into that thermos and have one of your silly little allies do it for you, child."

"Who?" snaps Danny as he charges an ectoray in his hands. "Who told you to do that? Was it Plasmius? Skulker? Walker?" Desiree smiles at him, merely floating there with her arms crossed arrogantly across her chest. Her red eyes gleam in the darkness, for the wishing ghost clearly enjoys that her newfound inability to grant his wish is tormenting him much more than even she could've hoped for. "Which one of my enemies was it?"

"What makes you think it was an enemy?" she taunts, and at this point, Danny can't contain himself anymore. Firing a powerful ectoblast at Desiree, Danny flies forward and then slams her with his energy charged fists as she dodges the shot he fired at her. His blows send Desiree careening towards a wall, and the wishing ghost barely manages to go intangible in time to pass harmlessly through. Her laughter echoes powerfully through the silent, empty streets, and Danny's eyes flash in frustration.

"Perhaps it was a friend," she continues darkly, and Danny's glances rapidly around the empty buildings as he tries to figure out where she's hiding. He knows that she's close, but it's so dark, and he's hurting so much, and that stupid song won't leave him alone long enough to concentrate anymore. He knows now that he definitely wasn't ready to start fighting again, to start patrolling and protecting the town, for it's been ages since he's actually struggled in a fight against Desiree. At this moment, he's wondering if he even has what it takes to face down the Box Ghost, which for him might be one of the lowest points in his entire ghost-fighting career. "Someone you consider an ally."

"My friends wouldn't do that to me!" he growls stubbornly, unable to help himself, but the thought nags at him anyway. "Damn it, Desiree, just tell me who did it!"

"Why should I?" she laughs. "You're my enemy, Phantom. I have no _desire_ to do you any favors."

As Danny floats there, he heaves a heavy sigh. He's in no mood for this, for her games and her taunts in the dark. The one hope he held onto in case Jazz fails is now gone unless he can somehow manipulate Vlad or someone else into making the wish for him (which even he knows is depressingly unlikely), and floating back down to the ground, he lets himself transform back into a human, not caring that he's in the middle of his street. It's three in the morning, after all, and the few who might have woken up when the ghost attack began are likely hiding in their beds. "Fine, then. You win. I don't care. I didn't even grab the stupid thermos. By the time people are actually awake and making stupid wishes, the ghost hunters will have found you and caught you anyway."

At first his frustration is greeted by silence, and believing Desiree to be gone, Danny heads back towards his house. He knows he should fly back to his room so that his parents will be less likely to notice that he left, but he just can't bring himself to transform again tonight. This time was by far different from earlier when he was showing off in front of his family and friends. It hurt much worse, and that cold feeling wouldn't leave him at all.

"You're actually walking away and letting me do as I please?" she speaks when Danny is about ten feet from his doorway, and he pauses, turning back to face her in what was an empty street only moments before, yet now she's floating there, her head cocked to the side like a dog as she tries to figure out if he's simply tricking her somehow. "You're going to just let me win?"

"Like I said, what's the point?" he grumbles. "I'm tired, and talking to you is getting me nowhere. Go harass Valerie or Vlad or something. Just leave me alone. I'm not in the mood to listen to you taunt me, and I've been kinda having trouble with the witty banter lately."

"You're not as fun as you used to be," she complains. "Half the reason we ghosts come here is to fight you and test our skills against yours. If I knew you'd be like this, then perhaps I would have granted his wish differently."

Danny freezes in his tracks, and for the first time, he feels a kind of cold that has nothing to do with ice powers or lost memories. It's dread, pure and simple, that comes from an understanding so powerful that it's practically an instinct. "You're the reason I have no memory?" he whispers. "Someone wanted me to lose my memories, and they used you to do it, didn't they? I knew it! I knew it wasn't just some stupid repression thing!" He pauses, then, as he starts to really think through what this means. "But if it's because of a spell, then that means I can't recover my memories through Jazz's stupid therapy sessions, can I?" Danny receives no response from the wishing ghost, but the look she gives him just before she vanishes from sight again suggests that he's right. "But why isn't it like that time with Sam and her wish? Why am I—why does it hurt all the time?"

Suddenly he's no longer talking to Desiree as he continues to ramble on, pouring out this heart to darkness. "Last time I didn't remember anything at all, but this time that stupid song won't leave me alone, and there's that weird cold feeling I get and the pain and the nightmares . . . Why's it different? Did whoever wished for me to lose my memories want it to be like this because they knew I'd go crazy or something?" Silence greets him from the darkness, and Danny nearly falls to his knees as the tears begin to build. He's never felt quite so hopeless as he does right now—or at least, as as far as he knows he hasn't. "Damn it, Desiree, can't you at least tell me that much since I'm just letting you go?"

For a moment he waits there, and doubting that she'll ever answer, he eventually forces himself to walk the rest of the way down the sidewalk and to the door of Fenton Works. His hand is on the knob and the lights from the neon sign are casting their faint, eerie glow on Danny when she finally replies.

"Because, Phantom, she didn't wish to erase your memories. She wished for me to rewrite time, and since those experiences never actually happened in the rewritten timeline, you had no memories of them," explains Desiree, and it sounds as if she'll say no more when another whisper from her comes to him as if carried on a breeze. "And besides, child, some memories leave scars that can never be completely erased."

And it's then that he knows that while his memories might not have been repressed by his subconscious or anything like that, that doesn't mean they aren't as terrible as he and everyone else believes, and suddenly it's more important than ever to him to get those memories back. Someone thought that they were important enough-or terrible enough-to have erased from his mind forever, and since Danny refuses to believe that one of his allies ever would have dared to tamper with his mind (or disrespected him enough to do so, as the case might be), he believes that whatever his memories contain must be some piece of crucial information that one of his enemies doesn't want him to have. Maybe it was Vlad. Maybe the man finally caught him and tortured him, or maybe he accidentally revealed some piece of secret information to him. Or if not Vlad, then maybe it was Skulker or Walker or the Guys in White (although he seriously doubts the GiW is responsible since Danny is unwilling to believe that they would be willing to enlist the aid of Desiree to take care of the problem). Whatever it is, knowing now that someone deliberately tampered with his mind just makes it all the more important to Danny that he figure out exactly what happened to him, and the sooner the better.

As he quietly slips inside Fenton Works, Danny is amazed that he manages to make it up to his room without being caught by his family. As he lay in bed, he once again finds that he cannot sleep, although this time it's not the nightmares that are keeping him up.

Instead it's a plan, the knowledge that he must do something to fix what has happened to him before it's too late, and there is only one person that he believes can help him now if Desiree can't.

Or rather, one ghost.

**A/N: An early update, but I felt like I should do it since I finished editing this chapter and, y'know, in honor of the fact that I'm going to be meeting some very real ghost hunters that are coming to my work tonight (yes, it's Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson from the SyFy show, so I mean it's not exactly the real-life equivalent to the Fentons or anything . . . if those even exist, lol. Still, it should be fun even if I'm generally a huge skeptic when it comes to the existence of ghosts and the supernatural).  
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**This chapter was a bit short compared to my other ones, too, but there's not many left now and I didn't want to needlessly drag the story out, so hence Desiree conveniently showing up. And I should admit that I totally had to rewatch Memory Blank when I started editing this chapter. It's been ages since I last saw it, and now I feel like the whole episode is full of plot holes or maybe subsequent episodes are as a result. A certain wishing ghost has kinda been giving me a headache with this story since I've had to write and rewrite to justify things, and watching that episode almost made it worse (because really, what is a wishing ghost that grants every wish she hears with very few limits on her powers anything but a giant, potential deus ex machina? I mean . . . ugh. Are we just supposed to assume Aladdin rules transfer or something or what? Pff. Whatever. Frustrating is what she is, that's all, and her presence, necessary though it might be for my story, has given me a headache).  
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**Next chapter, though, you guys will be getting A LOT of answers. Maybe too many, lol, but there's literally only two, maybe three chapters left now so it only makes sense. **

**And, as always, please review.**

**'Til next time!**


	4. Chapter 4: I Know a Place

**Chapter Four: I Know a Place Where No One's Lost**

Danny sits at the table, his eyes watching his family as they move through their usual morning routines. His sister is studying for a test she has three weeks from now, his mom is cooking breakfast and topping a pile of eggs and bacon with some hot fudge for his chocolate addict of a father, and his dad is rapidly talking about some new invention. Danny smiles and nods, pretending to listen to his father and paying just enough attention to be able to ask a question here or there about the "Fenton Ghost Zapper!" or whatever the name of the new invention is.

Today is going to be difficult, or so he thinks. He knows where he needs to go, but getting there will be close to impossible. It means skipping school—something he's well-accustomed to doing but less able to get away with now that his parents are aware of his ghost half—and getting through the Fenton Portal without either of his parents noticing or stopping him. It means going ghost and dealing with the pain it brings until he can make it through the Ghost Zone to where he needs to go, and it means avoiding all of his enemies in the process.

Yet Danny has spent all night preparing for this, and his plan is already in action. After his father finishes off his description of his new weapon with a "Pretty cool, eh?" Danny smiles.

"Yeah, Dad, that sounds really good," he replies as he heads over to the fridge, and opening the door he makes a show of looking around for a minute. "Huh, that's weird. We're out of fudge."

"We're out of what now?" exclaims Jack, jumping to his feet and pushing past his son, and looking through the fridge for his fudge like an addict searching for his next fix, Jack turns to Maddie, eyes full of horror. "Mads, this is unacceptable! We'll have to go to the store right away!"

"But Jack—" she begins, but Jack is already on his way out the door, keys to the Fenton RV in hand, and she sighs heavily as she shakes her head and then smiles back at her son. "Do you want a ride to school, Danny?"

"Are you serious?" scoffs Jazz, making it possible for him to avoid telling his parent's another lie (since, unbeknownst to his mother and father, they have plenty of fudge hidden upstairs in Danny's room). "No way. I can drive him. The last thing he needs is more damage to his psyche thanks to Dad's insane driving."

"Well . . . okay, sweetie," agrees their mother reluctantly as his father leans on the horn, and jumping she shakes her head and smiles. "I'm coming, Jack!" Turning back to her kids, she walks over to Danny and gently kisses him on the forehead, ignoring the way he flinches at her touch.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles nevertheless, and his mom shakes her head.

"It's okay, honey," she tells him, and for the first time Danny sees something in her eyes like the love and acceptance that used to be there before she found out about the lies, about his ghost half and about the way that he hid it even as she and Jack hunted him ruthlessly. The look, however, doesn't last, and in moments she's gone and Danny can't help but think, '_Two down, one to go'_ as the RV pulls away.

He's about to move onto the next part of his plan when his sister suddenly starts to hum something, and much to his shock, it's a very familiar yet unfamiliar tune. It's the song that he's never heard before but the same one that's been stuck in his head for weeks, and as he listens to his sister hum it, he can't help but stare at her.

"Jazz?" he whispers faintly, his voice shaking. "That song . . . what is it?"

"Huh?" she starts, snapping her eyes up to him, and then she chuckles softly. "Seriously, Danny, you need to listen to more than Dumpty Humpty. It's from _Les Mis_é_rables_."

"From Miserable what now?" he repeats.

"It's a musical, Danny," she sighs irritably.

"Uh-huh . . ." says Danny, staring at his sister. "You say that like it's something everyone should know or something."

"Most people do, little brother," she grumbles. "At least anyone cultured."

"Hence why I've never heard of it," he grins, and she shakes her head in dismay. Teasing his sister, however, isn't going to get him the answers that he wants. "What's the name of that song?"

"It's called 'Castle on a Cloud,'" she answers slowly, staring at him curiously, for most of the time her brother would sooner ignore ninety percent of the music she likes and there's a strange look in his eyes as he asks that makes her think there's something more to this. "Why, Danny? Does it mean something to you?"

For a moment he's not sure if he wants to tell her or not—after all, it might mess up his plans—but ultimately he plunges forward anyway. "Because I've had that stupid song stuck in my head ever since I got back," he replies, "and I have this feeling like it connects to my lost memories somehow. But it doesn't make sense! What the hell would some song from a musical that I've never even seen before have to do with anything?"

"Because . . ." begins Jazz slowly, and she looks horrified as she speaks, as if she's drawing the truth out of a dark, deep well that holds nothing but poison, "Danny, I don't know if it matters . . . I hope it doesn't matter, but . . ."

"What?" he presses, losing his patience, but she still says nothing and so he pushes a little harder, snapping at her, "Damn it, Jazz, just tell me!"

"Mom . . . she didn't really know any lullabies when we were little," Jazz explains reluctantly, her voice quiet and thoughtful. "One of her friends—it might've even been Vlad, you know how weird he is—made her a tape, and I guess that one was her favorite because she used to sing it to you all the time when you were a baby. You were really little when she stopped singing it, though, so you probably don't even remember it anymore . . . I wonder if she still has that tape somewhere?"

"So . . . what does that mean?" he asks slowly as he tries to digest the new information, but Jazz is a lot better at this sort of thing so he lets her take the lead. It seems as if she already has some idea about what the possibilities for this are, after all, since she didn't want to tell him the truth.

"I'm not sure, Danny, but what if mom's involved in whatever happened to you?" asks Jazz nervously. "I mean, we didn't really think about it before, but maybe your memories aren't the only ones that have been affected. Maybe ours have been, too, and we just didn't notice because it was less obvious."

"Or maybe it just means that Vlad's involved in all of this somehow if Mom did get that tape from him," thinks Danny, not wanting to believe that his family's minds might have been tampered with as well, yet the thought of Vlad being involved is hardly comforting, either. It's a troubling thought, mostly because it opens up a whole realm of possibilities that Danny's long since dismissed. "And if you were humming it, then maybe you were there for—for whatever it was, too."

"The musical it comes from is pretty famous, little brother," says Jazz with a faint smile, "and I've been listening to the soundtrack a lot lately while studying, so that song being stuck in your head might have nothing to do with me unless I'm also right about something being messed up with my memories, too. The whole thing is just a little too coincidental for there not to be a connection between your lost memories and Mom or me, though. It's still possible that you might be right about Vlad, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of man who goes to musicals because he likes them. I think he goes because he's rich and because he thinks it'll make Mom like him more if he seems classier."

"You're probably right about that," he mumbles, thinking about the fruitloop for a moment. "But I'd rather this all have something to do with Vlad than you or Mom."

"Me, too, Danny," admits Jazz.

Silence falls between the two of them as they consider what this new information means, but ultimately, neither one comes up with an answer and so Danny decides that he's just going to stick to his original plan. Biting his lower lip, he resists the urge to rub the back of his neck—it's a nervous habit his sister is well-aware of, and more than likely it'll make her think something's up if he does it—as he forces himself to speak up. "Hey, Jazz? Do you think that maybe I could skip school today?"

"Danny, I don't think that skipping school is going to help us figure this out any faster," she says. "And maybe Sam and Tucker will have some ideas that could help us, like . . . like if there was a production of the musical in town or somewhere nearby around the time you disappeared and that's where you were captured by someone, then Tucker would probably be able to help us find that information pretty quickly."

"It's not that! I'm just . . . I slept pretty badly last night," he replies, and it's not as if he's lying. He barely slept at all, between the nightmares and the incident with Desiree. "And I feel kind of sick, too. I think I just need a day to catch up on sleep. Do you think mom and dad'll be mad?"

"Oh, Danny . . ." Jazz sighs as she begins packing her books and assignments. "I know that it must be tough getting back to a normal routine again, but it's really better if you stick to it, and if you're absent then the school will end up calling Mom and Dad and we'll both get in trouble for it. You should have asked Mom before she left."

"I know," he admits, looking down at the table sheepishly, and he feels a little guilty about what he's going to say next but he knows that it's too important. And ultimately, if his sister says no, then he'll end up skipping later anyway. "I guess I was just worried she'd say no for all the reasons that you just said. But I'm not lying, Jazz. I'm really just feeling kind of lousy today and I was hoping to get some sleep. Trust me, I'm not going to make this a habit, okay? Please, Jazz?"

"Well . . . okay, Danny," agrees Jazz at last. "You stay home and get some sleep, and I'll cover for you at school and let Sam and Tucker know where you are. But don't even think about asking me to cover for you again tomorrow. If you want to skip again, next time you've got to go through Mom first, okay, little brother?"

"Seriously?" he exclaims, his eyes shining as he looks up, and if not for the horrifyingly dark circles there or the pale cast to his face Jazz might have believed he was lying to her. Yet before she can follow this line of reasoning, her brother jumps to his feet and throws his arms around her, embracing her tightly. "Thanks, Jazz."

"No problem, Danny, but I'm serious. If I find out that you're running around chasing down our mayor and asking him all kinds of crazy questions today instead of taking a nap, then there's going to be hell to pay when I get back," she replies sternly, yet she's hugging him back and there's no flinching, no pulling away or uneasiness there. It's the first real hug they've shared since he returned, and Jazz is simply too happy to question it or press her brother about his desire to stay home. It's not as if he doesn't look tired, after all, and so with a smile she forces down her uneasy feeling and decides to just trust that her brother isn't up to anything. "I have to get going. Do you think you'll be okay on your own for a minute?"

"I'm inside the Fenton Fortress, Jazz," he chuckles, gesturing to their house as he smiles at her and dons his mask. "I'll be fine."

"Still . . . be careful, okay, baby brother?" she tells him as she shoulders her backpack, and he nods, watching her as she walks out the door. Waiting until he hears the sound of her car pulling away, Danny quickly changes forms and then descends through the floor and into the lab since he knows that his parents will be back soon and he can't afford to get caught by them here. With the single touch of a finger, the portal doors spring open, and Danny flies into the ghost zone.

The trip seems to take an eternity, but Danny is grateful that there's no trouble on his journey beyond a close encounter with Johnny 13 and Kitty. The two ghosts, however, are too busy arguing with each other to notice Danny's presence, and after they pass out of sight he continues on to his destination. At long last he arrives at the ancient clock tower, home to his mentor and ally, and without bothering to knock (for the Master of Time knows all), Danny walks into the tower and heads to the viewing room since it's where Clockwork tends to spend most of his day.

As he grows closer, he can hear a voice, and much to his surprise and embarrassment, it turns out that voice is his. He knows that Clockwork must be playing a scene from his past (or perhaps future), and as Danny grows closer, he begins to make out the words. It's only when he's just outside the room that he realizes he just keeps on hearing the same sentence over and over again since the image from his past is stuck on repeat.

"Please, just make it all go away!"

A chill runs through Danny, then, and as he steps into the room, the screen freezes. Glancing up at it, Danny sees an image of himself, and although he can't be sure since his memories are gone, instinctively he knows it's a scene from his missing past. The image is horrifying, for he's covered in ectoplasm and blood, the top of his jumpsuit is shredded, and his normal otherworldly glow is faint, almost nonexistent. His glowing green eyes are red and swollen as tears stream down his pale cheeks, and the present Danny's eyes widen as he studies the image of his past self. He wants to ask what it is, what it means, but the words won't come for he's transfixed by how badly injured his past self is, and it can't help but make him believe his present self shouldn't exist at all. It's only when the screen suddenly flickers and turns into a swirling green fog that he's able to look away, and floating nearby is the Master of All Time.

Clockwork.

And the first words out of Danny's mouth surprise even himself, if only because he can barely believe it even as his instincts scream that he's right. "You're the one who made Desiree erase my memories, aren't you?"

"Yes."

**A/N: I actually **_**agonized **_**over what song it would be. I had a few different ideas about it, but I always knew that the song had to meet some basic criteria. For example, Danny couldn't have heard it before or at least couldn't remember hearing it before, even if it was vaguely familiar to him for some reason (which ruled out more of the songs I had in mind than I would've liked); it had to be about two decades or so old given the date the show originally premiered; and it had to be something that could be used as lullaby but, again, wasn't typically used that way otherwise he might've heard it. Ultimately, I went with the Les Mis song, but I'm still not sure if I'm happy with that choice . . . Meh. **

**And for the curious, yes, Vlad gave Maddie the tape. Giving someone who's just had a baby a tape with some lullabies on it actually isn't an uncommon gift, or, y'know, at least wasn't when tapes were still commonly used, and it seems like the kind of thing he'd offer her when she had a baby given the effects that music can have on babies (and I imagine he'd want to show up Jack by offering slightly "classier" lullabies than "Baa Baa Black Sheep" or something). At the very least, that's how I'm explaining it here since I'm assuming that even though they rarely saw each other before the reunion, rarely doesn't equal never and the big events in Maddie's life, at least, were things that he'd pay attention to since he still had a crush on her (re: obsession with her). There's more to the song, but it'll be a little bit longer before you guys get to find out what.**

**But now you guys know a couple of things, right? And yes, I'm a jerk. I ended up stopping the chapter here because it felt like the appropriate place to end it (even if the chapter came out a bit short again because of it). Don't worry, though, I won't leave you waiting for very long. Expect an update within the next couple of days, 'cause the rest of what was originally going to be the second part of this chapter is already written and is just in need of some serious editing before I post it. ;)**

**And, as always, thanks to everyone who reviewed last chapter, and I hope that you will take a minute to leave a review after this one as well. **

'**Til next time!**


	5. Chapter 5:  The Master of All Time

**Chapter Five: The Master of All Time**

The Master of All Time. The title sounds so eloquent, so powerful, so forceful and intimidating. Even though Clockwork did not choose the moniker, the ancient ghost does nothing to stop the name from spreading. Most of the time Clockwork does as he pleases with the time stream. He sees the various paths and the alternate futures, and because of his unique perspective Clockwork is capable of making necessary sacrifices for the greater good of all, of accepting the short-term suffering of people if it means prosperity in the long run. He is, quite simply, much more farsighted than the humans and ghosts that he privately swears to protect and is constantly forced to answer to.

There are only a handful of people who know the oath that Clockwork keeps, who know how he chooses to preserve and protect the world he cares so much about, and that is simply because Clockwork cannot allow himself to grow too close to anyone. Love is beautiful and friendship makes people capable of extraordinary things, but for Clockwork, such has always been a weakness. He has the power to alter the destiny of the entire world with a wave of his hand—if he ever cares too much, if he ever loves someone more than the duty he swears to uphold, then there is always that possibility that he will sacrifice the world for the sake of one, that he will choose the happiness of an individual over the happiness of all, and for Clockwork, such a choice is unacceptable.

Or at least it was until the day that Danny Fenton fell under his care. The boy is incredible, courageous and kind and filled with a brilliance that is impossible to put into words, and although he has as much potential for darkness as any, he also has the potential to do great good. The child is not perfect—sometimes he hurts others without intending to do so, sometimes he makes the wrong choices—but it simply makes Clockwork like Daniel more. The boy is a hero, but he is still part human; thus, he is still allowed to be weak and to make mistakes, which means that he is precisely the type of being that Clockwork can never be.

It would have been easy for the ghost to be jealous of the boy, but that is not in his nature; instead, Clockwork merely finds that he wants to spend more time with the boy, to learn more about him and to protect him more than nearly anyone else that he has or will encounter during his long afterlife. Although this didn't seemed dangerous at first, the ancient ghost now wishes that he maintained the distance between him and Daniel that they first had when they met almost three years ago, if only because it meant that the boy would not be here now. Clockwork, after all, is the Master of All Time. He is not supposed to make mistakes, but in the end he did when he chose to do something for Daniel that will do for no one ever again: he chose not to look at the boy's future out of respect for who the child is and because Clockwork feared what he might do if he saw something in that future, something necessary yet painful that Clockwork might want to change but shouldn't. Clockwork chose to have faith in the boy and his choices, to have faith that Daniel would be capable of fixing his own mistakes and would be able to handle the problems that life handed him, and to have faith that his time altering powers would not be needed again. He had already interfered so much in the boy's life, and although he didn't regret that decision (it was, after all, for the benefit of the world), he didn't want to do it again if he could help it.

Even so, it shouldn't have mattered. The boy did everything right on the day of the C.A.T., and on that last day when Clockwork chose to take a glimpse at the boy's fate, all was well. It should not have changed simply because Clockwork stopped himself from checking on Daniel's future on a regular basis. The boy should have been fine—there was no darkness on the horizon in the world's timeline when he gazed into the future, and the huge impact that the boy had on that should have made it evident as to whether or not there was a problem with Danny's own future even if Clockwork wasn't directly observing it. Yet even though Daniel continues to do what is right in the future, even though he pushes forward and never stops doing what is noble and what is honest and good, Daniel is not and likely never will be completely happy and whole again. Mentally, a part of him is shattered forever, and all of that could have been avoided if Clockwork had simply done his job and checked on Daniel as he is meant to do.

And much as the ghosts call him the Master of All Time, Clockwork is not in complete control of the time stream. He cannot alter the past all the time—the cases are limited, dependent upon potential paradoxes and time displacements—and because of his personal involvement in this case, he actually _can't_ change the past. It creates a paradox that is impossible to truly resolve—after all, how can the Master of All Time change a past he refused to see when it was still nothing more than a possible future?

He tried to fix it, even so. He removed that part of Daniel's life, used Desiree to take a piece of the past and lock it away inside of him and the others. If he couldn't change it, then he could at least make them forget, make the time as nonexistent as possible so that perhaps the boy could still be happy and whole.

It was a fool's wish, however, a fool's desire, and deep down Clockwork knew that even then. The boy was always going to come to him, always going to ask to find out about his past, and the only thing Clockwork has really done is given the boy a chance to prepare himself for what's to come, or rather, what has already been. And Clockwork knows now that whether he respects the boy or not, he needs to watch his future as carefully as any other. The day he finally admitted such to himself was the day he saw that Daniel would come to him after his fight with Desiree, and now, at long last, here he is.

It is now time for Clockwork to correct his mistake.

* * *

><p>"Why?" Danny asks after Clockwork confirms his belief, and the ghost sighs as he shifts between forms. "Why did I want you to change the past? Why couldn't you change it?"<p>

"I don't have unlimited power, Daniel," Clockwork explains as he twists the knobs on his staff, the closest thing the ghost has to a nervous habit. "I couldn't change the past without creating an irresolvable paradox, since the fate that befell you came of a mistake that I made. As much as I wished I could change it, I could not. What happened that day was painful, traumatic, and it is a wound you will never truly recover from. I hoped that having Desiree alter the memories of you as well as your family and friends would be enough, but it wasn't, and wishing for her to alter the time stream entirely would not have solved your problem—it merely would have created divergent universes, one in which you were still suffering and one in which you were not. Erasing your memories was the best I could do, if only because it meant that you would be given the time to prepare yourself for the knowledge of the past you've now lost. I'm sorry, Daniel."

"You don't need to apologize," Danny tells him. "From the looks of things, I was the one who came to you and asked you to change my past."

"I am well aware of that, Daniel, and am not apologizing for such," he replies. "I am apologizing for not paying careful attention to your future. After you took the C.A.T., I checked your future for the last time. I believed that all was well, and since I still had a general view of the future, if not yours specifically, I could tell that you remained a force for good. I assumed that such meant you were safe."

"I was an arrogant fool," he cursed bitterly as he shifted into an old man. "Because I no longer watched your future, I could no longer alter your past if something actually happened to you. Although it seems as if time is fluid, there is a fixed present, the moment we exist in right now. The past and future can be altered, but only to an extent unless one wishes to create multiple universes, and then the future has only been changed in one timeline, not all, and so somewhere you still would have been suffering. Thus, the past can only be altered indirectly, or by someone who has the foresight to prevent the past from coming to be when it is still the future. Since I chose to ignore your future out of my well-meaning yet misguided respect for you, Daniel, I could not prevent the horrible future that has now become an unalterable part of your past."

"I—I don't understand," Danny admits slowly, and Clockwork chuckles gently.

"It's okay," he says. "You don't have to. Just know, Danny, that I made a mistake, and that I feel as responsible for your fate as you feel for the fate of those that you fail to save from the ghosts who attack your town. I may have attempted to fix it as best I could at your request, but clearly they were not enough."

"It's not—I mean—maybe it's working a bit," shrugs Danny. "I'm not sure. But there's just—just this sense of everything being not quite right, and there's this pain when I go ghost—" he pauses, clutching his chest "—that I just want to go away, or that I at least want to understand. And there's this song that's stuck in my head all the time now. Jazz says that my mom used to sing it to me when I was a baby and stuff, and—well—I don't get it, really, but I don't even care about that part so much. I mostly just want to stop _flinching_ when my friends and family touch me. I want to be able to protect the town with a clear conscious and not worry that I did something awful during those three weeks that I just can't remember, or that I lost a fight because of a stupid mistake. As long as I don't know what happened to me, it's going to eat at me in little ways, and . . . I don't know. It might be worse. It might not. I don't know what happened, but from that image it doesn't look good."

"Are you sure you're prepared to remember?" Clockwork asks, knowing that despite what the boy claims he doesn't actually _want _to remember but feels obligated to do so out a sense of responsibility and duty. Even though Clockwork asks the question, he already knows Danny's answer since he's been carefully monitoring Danny's future once again, and more to the point, he knows that unlike some of the others whose memories he had Desiree tamper with, Danny will be able to handle it.

Yet as Danny thinks about it for a moment, he can feel his chest tightening and the beginning of an anxiety attack. The song is growing louder inside his mind, screaming for some kind of release, and as Danny recalls the image of himself from Clockwork's screen, he wonders if he did something terrible. He must have, he thinks, for what else could drive him here?

"I . . . I hurt someone, didn't I?" he whispers, his voice quaking.

"Not in the way that you think," says the ghost slowly as he shifts into a middle-aged man. "Someone was hurt because of what happened to you, but it was not because you turned evil. You simply . . . You made a careless mistake, Daniel, as did I. I should have watched your future, just as you should have heeded your friends, your sister, and I when we told you that you needed to tell your parents the truth."

Clockwork's words instantly bring the conversation that Danny had with Lancer just yesterday to mind, where the old teacher spoke to him about his greatest fears, and at that moment Danny begins to realize what he's forgotten, what must have happened to him. The pain makes sense now, as does the fear, the flinching, the anxiety and the cold, distant fog that is hanging over him even now. He still cannot completely believe it, and knowing this, Clockwork floats over to the wall before grabbing something.

It's a medallion, and it shines brilliantly despite the dim light, the two letters on it glowing ever so slightly. "The wish that Desiree granted to remove your memories and to alter those of your family and friends . . . I had her use one of my medallions in it in case you needed your memories returned. All you have to do is touch it, Daniel, and the wish she granted for me, the wish that you would forget those weeks, will end. Whether or not you also choose to hand the medallion to your friends and family so that they might remember the truth as well is up to you, but . . . I would advise against it."

For a long moment Danny stares at the medallion, a part of him screaming that he should not, cannot take it. He knows that the harmless looking artifact will destroy him the instant his fingers brush across its cool surface. He knows that he will remember something so horrifying that when he originally came to this tower he begged Clockwork to undo it or help him forget, and, suspecting what that something is now that things are slowly being revealed to him, Danny is even more afraid to touch it.

"I don't . . . I don't want to know," Danny admits, and he's shaking badly as a cold sweat breaks out across his ghostly flesh. "I know that whatever it was, it was . . . " he pauses, trying to find the words, but in the end he can't and he merely shakes his head, skipping this part since he knows that he does not need to say it. "But I _need _to know the truth. I can't keep living this way, I mean, unless you think that whatever happened to me is so bad that it'll drive me to, well. . . to turn into _him_."

There is no need to specify what Danny means by that—it is always the same one, always the same fear, and sitting in a room nearby is a thermos that Clockwork has never shown to Danny because just as there are some truths Danny can handle, there are others the boy cannot, or at least not yet.

"No, Danny," Clockwork says calmly. "You'll still be the hero, regardless of what happens now, but this will change you. It will alter the way you look at your friends, at your family, and at your life, and no matter how far ahead I gaze, it is clear that this part of your past will always haunt you. It's not the kind of thing that one can ever completely move on from."

Desiree's own words echo in his head, then, about how some memories leave wounds so deep that the scars will never heal and will never truly be forgotten, and as Danny stares at the medallion, he slowly forces his hand towards it. "Okay, then. If I won't hurt the people I care about because of this . . . then I guess I can live with it."

Reaching out, he takes the medallion from Clockwork, yet Danny does not scream. Rather, as the memories flood back, he clutches the piece closer to his chest as his breath begins racing. His body trembles and he is paralyzed to the spot as he falls to his knees, shaking and sweating. If Clockwork thought it might help the boy, then he would hug him, but he knows that touching Danny right now is the worst thing he can possibly do. He has to let the boy suffer through his past, and unfortunately, Danny must do it alone.

**A/N:** **So, as promised, another update this week, and in the next chapter you'll finally get to find out just what memory Clockwork erased à la flashback style (but I'm guessing that a lot of you have figured it out already by this point). That chapter will probably be posted in a few days since I've got most of that one edited, too, but I'm also going to be very busy over the next few days so don't take that as an ironclad guarantee, 'kay?  
><strong>

**And although I'll probably restate it at the beginning of that chapter, I'm going to warn all of you lovely readers right now that the next chapter is very dark, very gruesome, and has a few graphic descriptions and scenes that are likely going to pushing my 'T' rating a bit, so if you have trouble reading or dealing with that sort of thing . . . yeah. Consider this a warning. The first part of the chapter will make it very obvious what happened to Danny if you haven't figured it out already, so if you can't stomach that sort of thing, then you may want to skip to the end once you know where it's going. I admittedly held back a little bit since I know my tolerance for it is crazy high and somewhat abnormal, but still. Might be a bit tough to read.**

**In any case, I hope you guys enjoy the holidays, and if you have a little free time, then please review! ;)**

**'Til next time!  
><strong>


	6. Chapter 6:  There Is a Lady All in Blue

**Chapter Six: There Is a Lady All in Blue**

_It is ten o'clock and Danny sits upon the roof of Fenton Works, wondering what excuse he will use this time. His body is aching and badly bruised, and a small cut near his forehead is leaking ectoplasm onto his jumpsuit. Although he can avoid coming up with an excuse for being home after curfew all together if he simply goes inside now, Danny dreads trying to come up with a lie to explain the injury more than he does explaining his tardiness. He also does not wish to see his sister worry when she sees how badly injured he was in his fight with Skulker tonight._

_Twirling the thermos around in his hands, he gazes up at the nearly impossible to see stars. The light from the huge Fenton Works sign makes all but the brightest stars and planets impossible to see, and not for the first time Danny secretly wishes for a power outage so that he can see more than a mere handful of those precious pinpricks of light shining down upon the earth. Of course, even then he probably wouldn't get his wish. Knowing his parents they probably have a generator or something ready for just that occasion, and his Dad would no doubt insist that the lights be left on for all to see in case the power outage was caused by ghosts or some other such nonsense. _

_No matter how hard Danny tries, though, his head is simply aching too much for him to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he's late. Maybe, he thinks, it would just be better if he slipped intangibly into his room and pretended to be there all along. He can say that he was taking a nap when his mom made dinner, or that he got home hours ago and they just missed him. _

"_It's not going to work," he mumbles, but as the bleeding finally stops he knows that he is just too worn out to care. The ghost attacks are getting to be too much for him to handle, for they come more frequently and his opponents always seem to be getting stronger and smarter. Danny continues to remain a step ahead of them in both respects, but he knows that it won't be long now before he comes up against an opponent he can't handle._

_Sighing, he turns intangible and slips into his room, and the instant his feet touch his bedroom floor an alarm begins to blare. The haze in his mind vanishes as lights flash and a loud, ringing tone pierces the air, and shouting he falls to his knees and shoves his hands over his ears instead of transforming into harmless, human Danny Fenton. It should have been a small mistake, yet the consequences make it the biggest one he'll make in his life._

_Although he expects his parents to come charging in, neither Maddie nor Jack appear before a half-dozen weapons emerge from the walls, hidden inside panels that Danny never knew existed. He curses himself for not paying more attention to the changes his parents have made to the defense system and the new inventions they've been creating lately, but he's just been so tired and it's been so hard to keep up with the ghost fighting, let alone with what's happening at school or with his family or with the new installations his parents have been busy tucking away inside his house. He knows he ought to change back, but as the first blast fires the thought flies from his mind as rapidly as he dives through the floor of his room._

_He expects the kitchen to be no better and he's right, but not for the reasons he expects. A weapon near the ceiling swivels and fires at him, and as Danny dodges it another blast catches him from behind. Instead of the pain he expects, he is paralyzed. He cannot move, cannot speak, cannot scream, and as he loses control over his powers, he falls to the floor like a stone and cannot even catch himself. Danny's head slams against the tiles and the wound that was healing nicely mere moments ago splits open again, and as the alarm continues to ring and destroy his ear drums, Danny believes that he is going to die. There is no escape, no way out now that he cannot move, yet surprisingly the weapons on the walls don't fire at him, as if somehow the system knows that he's been neutralized for now and that there's no need. _

_Desperately Danny tries to make himself transform back into his human half, hoping that maybe the transformation will dull or eliminate the effects of the paralytic, yet even that part of his power is locked away further than he can touch. He feels like a small child staring at a box of his favorite cookies on top of the fridge, for his human half is within sight even as it's completely out of reach, and inwardly he lets out a small cry of frustration._

'_Why aren't my parents coming? Where's Jazz?' he wonders as he lays there. Tears unwillingly leak from his eyes as the light from the alarms continues to blind him, yet the situation is so bad that Danny probably would have cried anyway if it was within his power to actually do so. _

_It takes Danny a long time to remember why they aren't there, something which he blames the obnoxious alarms for. Jazz is at a college, staying over there for the night with a freshman as part of a welcome weekend for prospective students. As for his parents, the pair of them are having dinner with some paranormal researcher tonight to discuss theories about . . . well, about something Danny forgot since he was never really listening when his mom talked about it this morning, but Danny knows they'll be back soon. He's a bit surprised that his neighbors haven't called the cops by now, though, but then again it's possible that none of his neighbors are home._

_Or perhaps they are simply accustomed to their frustratingly noisy neighbors and have developed a habit of sleeping with ear plugs._

_When the alarm finally stops, Danny doesn't actually notice. He can still hear the ringing in his head all too clearly, and his first indication that it's been silenced is when a pair of gloved hands roughly pick him up and flip him over. There is no sympathy on his parent's faces, only a kind of disturbing, predatory hunger, and if ever there was a moment for a dramatic, cartoon style gulp, it is now._

_Yet Danny is still paralyzed, and his mouth is just slightly open instead, having frozen at the moment that he began to cry out when the weapon hit._

"_It's Phantom, Jack!" exclaims Maddie excitedly, and Danny wants to scream. He knows what's coming, what's going to happen, yet there's nothing he can do to stop it. If only he remembered that everyone was out for the night. He never would have hesitated to come home, never would have passed intangibly into his room. The confluence of stupidity, of his foolishness and the mistakes he's made because of his exhaustion and his injuries makes Danny want to slam his head against a wall._

_Or at least it would if his head wasn't already in horrible pain. The paralytic that was fired at him, after all, only made it impossible for him to move, not impossible for him to feel, and the realization of the kind of pain that will soon greet him makes him nauseous._

"_The ghost boy?" says Jack as he holds out a gun. "He must've gotten hit by one of the new Fenton Ghost Stunners! I wonder what he's doing here, though . . ."_

"_Probably stealing more inventions," Maddie scoffs as she spots the thermos lying on the floor near the fridge. Danny does not even remember when it fell from his hands, but he suspects it was after he was shot. Numerous ghost fights have made Danny very, very careful about not losing his hold on the precious containment device, after all, and he doubts he would have ever allowed it to leave his fingers so long as they were within his control. "Hmm . . . you should hit him with it again, Jack, just in case. I'm not sure how long he's been here, and it could be wearing off. We've never actually tested it on a ghost before."_

"_Good idea, Mads," says Jack gleefully, and as poor as his father's aim is, even he can't miss Danny from two feet away with his brand new toy. Like the first time the weapon hit, Danny feels no pain as the blast slams into him, yet he has no doubt that he won't be moving again anytime soon. His parents' inventions have an annoying habit of working even better than anyone expects, even if the reasons why aren't always that clear to Danny, his friends, or his parents. "Are we set up in the lab for a dissection?"_

"_No . . . !" Danny screams silently, the word blurring in his mind into a nightmarish sounding wail. His parents may be calling it a dissection—after all, ghosts are supposed to be dead already—but it's not. Vivisection. That's what his parents are planning on, that's what they're going to do to him. A god damn vivisection._

_And there is no Jazz here to rescue him, no sister or friends to save him from his parents well-meaning yet misguided research. He knows now that he should not have waited to tell them the truth for so long, that he should have been more careful about coming into the house, that he should have listened to his father when he blathered on that morning about his 'latest invention!' before that invention ended up killing him, albeit indirectly._

_Yet his wishes, the would-haves and could-haves are all meaningless as his father picks him up and carries him down the laboratory stairs, his footsteps echoing like the pounding of nails being hammered into a coffin. Desperately Danny tries to move, tries to transform, tries to speak or to do anything that might save him, but it's useless. He is completely helpless._

_His father lays him on a cool metal table that feels too much like what Danny imagines a mortuary slab to be like, but if this continues, he won't have to imagine it for very long. His mother's footsteps echo through the lab now as she joins Danny's father, and when she steps over and looks down at him, she is wearing her goggles and has the hood of her hazmat suit on. It makes her look like a little blue alien instead of the cliché green, and if he wasn't paralyzed then he might've burst into a fit of mad giggles._

_His father, on the other hand, looks like nothing so much as a bright orange sun burning too close to Danny for comfort as he looks down at him, seeing not his son but a ghost. Jack's hand reaches out and curiously touches Danny's cheeks, and although he can't see the surprise there behind the goggles and the hood, the way his father jerks his hand away and mumbles to Maddie reveals his shock. "It feels as if he has an actual bone structure, Mads! Do ya think it's just an ectoplasmic construction that he's configured to more easily maintain his current manifestation?"_

_If he wasn't frozen in place, then Danny might've expressed the shock he is feeling inside. He's never heard his father sound quite so . . . scientific before. Usually the multiple syllable words come out of his mom's mouth, not his dad's, but then again, he knows he shouldn't be surprised. His father is a scientist and an inventor. He must be smarter than he generally seems to be since his inventions are generally rather successful._

"_Perhaps . . . or maybe he's not a pure ectoplasmic manifestation," hypothesizes Maddie. "Perhaps he's using actual remains and using ectoplasm to animate it. It would certainly explain why he appears so remarkably human compared to the vast majority of other spectral entities we've encountered so far. We know that ghosts are capable of overshadowing living humans, so maybe Phantom is actually possessing a human corpse and using it as an anchor to maintain his spectral form. It might explain why he seems to be capable of maintaining his current power levels even though he rarely returns to the Ghost Zone." Is she proposing that he's some sort of creepy zombie? Danny hopes not, for it will make it very, very difficult to convince her otherwise if she learns the truth about him today. The thought of his mom believing that he's a ghost reanimating her son's corpse for his own purposes makes him worry about what will happen if they actually manage to perform the vivisection and it lasts long enough for him to pass out._

"_That can't be it, Mads, he can turn intangible. We've seen it."_

_Keep arguing, Danny pleads silently. The longer they theorize, the more likely the effects of the weapon will wear off, and the more likely it becomes that Danny can escape. Experimentally he tries to blink to see whether or not the paralytic's worn off._

_And fails._

"_Ghosts have the ability to manipulate their own molecular structure through ectoplasm and that of the entities and objects around them," she objects. "It's possible that he's capable of altering the vibration of the reanimated body's molecules to make it capable of phasing through matter that would then be vibrating on a different frequency. We've seen other ghosts make objects and organic matter that were not originally part of their spectral form intangible."_

_For the second time he attempts to blink._

_And fails._

"_Hmm . . . That's true, Mads. Well, I suppose we'll have to find out the old-fashioned way, then," his father chuckles as he pulls out a tool kit, and although Danny expects scalpels and the types of medical tools that are always used on television shows, the bag is full of what looks more like the sort of thing a carpenter or mechanic would carry around. Drills, hammers, saws . . . If he wasn't in ghost form, his heart would beat out of his chest._

_Desperately he attempts to blink again, straining harder and harder against the paralytic. He's out of time, and he knows it._

_Yet he still fails._

"_I wonder if we should sedate him," his mother murmurs._

"_Why bother? He can't move and it's not as if he can feel pain. He's a stinkin' ghost, Maddie," his father chuckles, and although it's his father's normal laughter, it sounds demonic to Danny's ears. It's the context, he thinks, that makes it sound horrifying, not the sound itself. His father isn't supposed to be laughing right now. He should be horrified. Of course, Danny knows that his father will be when he learns the truth, but for now, he just wishes his father would stop chuckling._

_For the fourth time ('is it the fourth?' he wonders silently, for he's not actually keeping track) he tries to blink._

_And fails._

_From a nearby table his mother pulls out a pair of seemingly innocent looking scissors, or at least, what would be innocent looking scissors if they weren't glowing green. "I know that, Jack, I just . . . It's unnerving, the way he's staring," she mumbles. "I'm not sure I can do this with his eyes like that. I know that he's just a ghost, but . . . but there's a sentience to him that's almost disturbing. This isn't exactly the same as cutting open a fetal pig in anatomy, Jack."_

'_So don't!' he screams mentally, and the last of his resistance begins to break down as he senses the inevitable falling upon him, pinning him down to that table in the form of a simple weapon shot. He begs them silently, 'Don't do it! Can't you see the truth now that you're so close? Can't you tell? Can't you realize that I'm your own son?'_

_His parents, of course, can't hear him at all since it's not as if Danny's developed telepathy, and much to Danny's dismay Jack puts a reassuring hand on Maddie's shoulder. "If it really makes you that uncomfortable, Mads, then I'll handle this part, but you were always better at it than I was. I doubt we have a sedative that would work on a ghost, too. It's not like they have an actual circulatory system."_

"_I suppose you're right, Jack," she sighs, and Danny wants to scream at them. Of course he has a circulatory system! He has a nervous system, doesn't he? How else would the damn paralytic they shot him with work if he didn't have one? There might be a way, maybe something that works only on ectoplasm, but Danny doubts it. He wants them to sedate him. If this is going to happen, he doesn't want to be awake to see it, and desperately he tries to will himself to pass out at the very least, but it's to no avail._

_And so Danny tries to blink again instead, his desperation rising with each new attempt he makes._

_Yet he still fails. His will alone cannot overcome this nightmare._

"_I'm going to cut open the top of his jumpsuit," she says calmly, and her goggles gleam in the bright lights like stars. Danny wishes he could cry right now. He wishes he could tell them the truth. He wishes that his sister and friends would walk in at any moment and put a stop to this, that some kind of miracle would come and put a stop to this._

_ He wishes he could just freaking blink._

_But as he tries again, not even that last wish comes true._

_For he fails._

_The cold scissors slice through his jumpsuit, and he knows that they're made of a special material. His jumpsuit is an afterimage, a type of ectoplasmic construct that's a reflection of Danny's moment of death, and it can't be cut or destroyed by ordinary means, unlike his flesh beneath it. The tools his father holds will easily do the job, however, and he can just make out a faint glint to the side and an all-too sharp looking blade. Danny tries to blink as he silently screams for what will not be the last time on this night._

_And fails._

_His mother finishes her cuts, and a part of the scissor blade accidentally slices into his skin near his bellybutton. It doesn't hurt much, but it's the first time his mother has hurt him and inside of Danny he feels something begin to break. "Oops," she mumbles, hands shaking as she laughs nervously. "It's certainly been a long time since we've done this, hasn't it, dear? Maybe you should handle the first incision."_

"_Aww, it's just nerves, Mads! This is our first time dissecting a ghost, after all!" proclaims Jack proudly as they change places. "Do you have the program ready to record the data?" _

_Danny tries to blink._

_And fails._

"_Of course, sweetie! The audio and visual recorders are ready," his mother replies cheerfully, and if Danny could, he would vomit. How can they use their pet names for each other while they're torturing him? Even if they don't think he's their son, even if they don't think ghosts are remotely human like, isn't there something about cutting open a seemingly innocent looking boy that disturbs them? Or was his mother's momentary qualms about it the only acknowledgement they'll give, the only sign they'll show that even they believe that what they're doing is wrong?_

"_Excellent, Mads! Now are you sure you want me to do the honors?" he asks, and it's at this point that Danny struggles to continue to see his parents as human beings. It's easier to think of them as monsters, easier to justify the rage and horror that's already growing inside of him if he stops seeing them as his parents or even people._

_Once again he tries to blink as his mother holds out a scalpel to his father and smiles at him. It's the only thing Danny can really see—her gloved hand holding the instrument that will rip his flesh and their bond apart in a single sweep—and as his father takes it, he wishes he could close his eyes. He wishes he couldn't feel what is happening right now as that instrument moves delicately down to the top of his chest and his father begins the classic 'Y' incision that Danny has had nightmares about ever since he became part-ghost._

_Surprisingly, the first cut hurts less than he expects, but then again, Danny is accustomed to pain and he knows it will only get worse. It's still horrifying enough that he wishes he could cry or beg them to stop, and as his father moves the scalpel down he starts to penetrate deeper into Danny's chest. "Amazing, Mads," his father whispers in awe. "See this? It's just ectoplasm, but the manifestation of muscular tissue and bones it's created is so accurate, so comparable to normal human anatomy . . . maybe these are his actual remains . . . or maybe it's because it's a young ghost? Maybe their initial forms are more accurate representations of their prior human bodies?" _

_Idly Danny notes that his father shifted from referring to Danny as an object instead of something at least resembling a person as Danny yet again tries to blink._

_And fails._

"_Perhaps . . ." Maddie murmurs. "I wonder if it'll have manifested organs as well, or if it'll just have an ectoplasmic core . . ." She picks up a saw, then, and starts to hum softly, and Danny wishes he could pass out. It would just be easier if he could pass out._

_The instant the saw touches his flesh and bones is the same instant when the pain gets to a point that Danny can no longer just brush it off. The sensation as it cuts through, the sound of it slowly destroying his ribs, the smell of his own ectoplasm as it leaks out of him . . . It's at this moment that he realizes that he won't live through this experience. It's impossible. To feel this pain, to hear it and to smell it and to practically taste the metal cutting through his flesh on his tongue is too much for him to ignore. He will die._

_Out of sheer desperation, he tries to blink._

_And fails._

_He's tuning out their conversations now, his entire body a study in life, death, and pain, although his mom isn't speaking much anymore as she cuts into him. She's humming a song, some gentle tune that he doesn't recognize but that seems strangely familiar, and it definitely doesn't fit the moment at all. He wishes he could shut her up even though it only exists through the pain in brief snippets and partial verses, yet the way she keeps repeating the same part of it over and over is driving him mad as surely as the blades cutting into him. If Jazz was here, then she would probably tell Danny all the psychological reasons why his mother's humming that particular song, but the reason his mother gives and that he happens to catch that is probably the most accurate:_

"_Jazz has been listening to it a lot lately. It's just stuck in my head, Jack," she explains. "Do you want me to stop?"_

_YES! Screams Danny silently, and her humming isn't the only thing he's referring to at the moment._

"_No, Mads, it's fine if it helps you relax. I forgot you had such a beautiful voice," he teases her._

_Danny can feel the ectoplasm leaking out of him, and he hears a scraping sound across the floor and vaguely hears something about turning down the temperature in the lab and a bucket to catch the ectoplasm he's losing so they can study it later. At least the humming covers up most of the tinny, dripping sound of his own lifeblood streaming into a pan beneath him, but it's not much of a comfort in his current hell. Once again he tries to blink, but he's slowly forgetting why he needs to or wants to._

_And once again he fails._

_The orange and blue blurs consume his vision, monstrosities swarming over him like vultures as they pick at his corpse with drills and saws, and he feels a fog begin to come over him. He has no idea how long he's been lying on this table, how long they've been cutting into him. The pain makes time meaningless even as it makes the seconds on what will soon become his icy death bed endless and unbearable and eternal. Has there ever been a moment when he didn't hurt? He can't remember anymore. He's pretty sure he's never felt anything but pain, never felt anything but the feeling of his bones snapping, of his flesh tearing, and of his life leaving him in a steady flow of green liquid that these vultures continue to catch in their icy bucket beneath him._

_He wishes someone would make it stop. He doesn't care who. Just someone. Anyone._

_He finds himself trying to blink again, yet he's unable to remember why he's doing it anymore. Maybe it's to make the music go away, for he's not sure where's it coming from any longer. Maybe it's to make the pain finally stop, although wouldn't he have blinked long ago if that was all it took to make this end?_

_Danny's not sure exactly how long it takes him to realize that this time he's succeeded._

_Just in case he's hallucinating from the loss of ectoplasm, he tries again. Danny manages to blink and the tiny success makes hope rise within him for the first time in . . . minutes? Hours? Days? Time has become meaningless to him at this point. But if he can blink, if it's not just a hallucination, then perhaps he can do more, after all. Perhaps he can destroy the orange and blue demons. Half-crazed, Danny can't help but wonder why these demon vultures aren't red. Aren't monsters supposed to be red or black or green or some other evil color?  
><em>

_A small corner of his mind shrieks that these blurs aren't monsters, that they're his stupid, oblivious parents, but the pain is too much and the voice in the back of his head isn't strong enough. Light flashes and consumes his vision, and suddenly a pair of goggles is his world as the blue creature peers into his own now barely glowing eyes._

_It mumbles something about his blinking, or maybe he just assumes that's what it is because he's scared they've realized he's regaining control. Danny's own screams are so loud in his head that the blue blur may be saying nothing. He's not sure he can hold on much longer, and a twisted part of him wants to get these creatures back for what they've done. He thinks at first that he ought to destroy them and their lab with a single wail, but a different thought occurs to him as he feels himself coming close to passing out and dying._

"_Hey, Jack?" he hears the blur say softly, for it's hard to ignore her voice when she's so close to him, a voice that he once found sweet and reassuring but that now sends him into a blind panic even as it speaks the first sympathetic words it's spoken the entire time he's been locked in this hell. _

_"I think he's crying . . ."_

_Reaching inside of himself, he struggles against the haze just long enough to think of his alter ego, of the boring old human Danny Fenton with his plain old black hair and innocent blue eyes, of a boy who stepped through a door and pushed a button that caused an accident that is just now finally bringing about an end to his life. This time he finds his humanity and he clutches to it like a rock climber clinging to a cliff face for salvation when their harness has failed, and he sees a flash of light in the lab as the two rings appear and flow over him. He hears his torturers' gasps and then a horrified scream, the sound of metal crashing to the floor as the blue blur-it's a person, he thinks vaguely through the fog, a lady dressed all in blue-collapses against the table full of tools and the orange blur desperately rushes to assist it._

_Much to Danny's surprise, whatever paralytic they used on him as a ghost has no effect on him as a human, but perhaps that's just because it's worn off completely at last and it took him an eternity to realize it. His chest is open and oozing as he slowly climbs to his feet, his own blood spilling into the metal pan that is filled with a horrifying amount of his own ectoplasm beneath his metal bed, yet now it's turning a brackish, brownish color as his blood contaminates it, and he thinks he must look just like the kind of zombie his mom was imagining his ghost half to be. The lab is cold, horrifyingly cold, and all he wants to do is run away but he's just not strong enough.  
><em>

"_D—Danny?" his father stutters as Danny rises like a corpse from a grave. The pain is horrifying, but he's going into complete shock at last. He's barely aware the pain exists, yet he's not so far gone that he has no clue about how rapidly he's dying._

_Danny doesn't answer his father as he shuffles over to the portal. Slamming his bloody finger against the DNA scanner as he holds in his guts as best he can with his other hand, he does not glance back at the lab as he plunges into the swirling green mass. He is dead. He knows it. And he's too scared to stay in that lab with his parents and face them.  
><em>

_Yet he knows other things, too, for as death begins to overtake him a strange sort of clarity reaches him. The fog is still there, too, but somehow he knows that he can't remain in the lab this way for his friends and sister to find, or for his parents to clean up after. And he knows that he ought to hate them for how they've destroyed him, that he ought to slaughter the monstrous blurs for ripping him to shreds . . . but he also knows who they are, they the blurs aren't just monsters but his parents as well, and that nothing, not even killing them, will change what's happen.  
><em>

_Yet somehow he still wants to do the right thing and to try and make this better, even though his heart is screaming that there will never, ever be a way to make this better. Even if it's his last act he wants to try and change what's happened, and there's only one person he thinks of that might have the power to do it as he shifts back into ghost form. He's hoping that it will be strong enough to carry him through the zone to his final destination, but as the ectoplasm in the ghost zone swirls around him Danny doesn't actually believe he'll make it to see the only ghost who has any chance of making this all okay again; however, Danny's never been one to give up, and so he plunges forward towards the only light he has left:  
><em>

_Clockwork._

**A/N: I honestly tried to keep the gore and the gruesome details during the dissection toned down and by my standards I think I did okay, so I doubt anyone had any real trouble reading it. After all, this story is only rated 'T' and I didn't feel like raising the rating for a scene that didn't have to be more than mildly gory. ;)  
><strong>

** So now you know what happened, why he was traumatized so badly, and you know that the song that Maddie used to sing to Danny as a lullaby is the same one that she's humming in this while cutting him to pieces (successfully resists the urge to state the obvious pun!). The answer to the mystery is, of course, the kind of plot that's been done a lot in this particular fandom, but I wanted to do my own take on it. I hope I didn't do too badly.  
><strong>

**Umm . . . yeah. I am barely coherent right now. I've spent my Christmas sick and skipped out on most of my plans for the day, so you guys got a much earlier update than I intended to give you because I was tired, sick, and half-crazy with boredom while confined to my apartment. (Did I just say I was sick twice . . . Yup. I totally did...ugh...Too lazy to edit it, too...)**

**And you can interpret Danny's actions at the end however you want. Either he was doing the hero thing and trying to make things right again, or he was just running away to die and justifying that as he entered the denial phase. I just wanted to do something different, y'know, since most of the time these sorts of fics end in dramatic rescues or with Danny going crazy and hating his parents forever and stuff. Which is logical and all, 'cause seriously, this is some crazy-messed up stuff, but still. **

**Or, y'know, occasionally there's been a few fics where there's no emotional fallout whatsoever, but in case you haven't noticed, this fic is all about the emotional fallout and crazy psychological damage this kind of experience would result in. My kinda thing.  
><strong>

**Make sense? Bah, I hope so. Anyway, maybe one or two chapters after this depending on editing and stuff . . . There should be a wrap-up with Clockwork and then a kind of aftermath/epilogue, and then that'll be that. Hopefully I won't disappoint you guys (and haven't disappointed you guys with this chapter, either).**

**And as always, please review if you can! It's definitely appreciated. ;)**

**'Til next time!  
><strong>


	7. Chapter 7:  Moving Forward

**Chapter Seven: Moving Forward**

It takes Danny a long time to pick himself up off of Clockwork's floor. He can remember it now, can remember what his parents did, how he came here and begged Clockwork to fix it, and how the ghost told him he could not change it, that this time the past was beyond his power to alter.

He remembers how he spent several weeks here under Clockwork and Frostbite's care. Clockwork froze him temporarily and placed him out of time until Frostbite came and began to heal him. How Frostbite managed to save his life, Danny couldn't begin to understand. He was certain he wasn't going to survive, and a small part of him didn't want to, either.

Yet he lived. Three weeks passed and he was, at least on the surface, completely healed with only the faintest traces of a scar, yet he continued to feel a phantom ache in his chest. And even three weeks later, he was still begging Clockwork to change it, to fix it, no matter how much the ghost claimed he could do nothing.

And then he brought in Desiree.

The wishing ghost was Danny's enemy, yet even she would not refuse Clockwork. At first Clockwork considered having her undo everything that had happened, but she was not strong enough to interfere with the time stream anymore, not after all of the battles that she had fought with Danny and his friends, and all her power was capable of doing was creating splitting the universes, creating one where Danny had suffered and one where he had not. The best she could do was to make it seem to everyone as if nothing had ever happened, and even then she was skeptical about that actually working. Some memories and some experiences, as she had so recently told Danny, were too powerful for any magic to ever completely erase, yet Clockwork and Danny both begged her and pleaded with her until she complied. She altered the memories of Danny and his friends and family as much as necessary, handed Clockwork the trigger which would allow them to be returned at the Master of Time's will, was bound from ever granting Danny and his friends another wish just in case Danny or one of his friends thought to seek her assistance, and then Danny was returned to his home with a seemingly blank slate.

Yet Desiree was proven right, for the phantom aches were still there, the whispers of a song still danced through his head, and anytime someone touched him he flinched, unconsciously remembering how the last time someone had touched him they had followed the act by cutting him open. The ghosts of his lost memories continued to haunt him, dogging his steps as diligently as Klemper stalked his "friends," and so Danny had returned.

And so he rises, now, with the weight of his past upon his shoulders, the ghost of his memories given new life by feeding off his lost ignorance. "I . . ." he begins slowly, softly, for his voice feels dry and it trembles. Danny falls to his knees, then, tears stinging his eyes, and his back arches as he tilts his head back and lets out a wail that is closer to an animalistic shrieking. The wail smashes into the ceiling of Clockwork's tower, making the chimes and bells crack, yet the tower itself remains miraculously unharmed.

He shrieks again, more piercing this time, and Clockwork listens in silence as his form shifts and Clockwork becomes a mad, permanently grinning child. Clockwork wishes to help Danny, but there's nothing he can do. He cares for Danny too much already, and all his love is hurting the boy more than it will ever be able to help.

"I don't . . . why can't you change it?" he cries, his eyes flashing brilliantly as he turns to the ghost of time. "Why?"

"We've been through this before, Daniel, countless times. And even if I had the power to alter this event, Daniel, it wouldn't matter anymore," sighs Clockwork softly. "You would still remember. The pain wouldn't leave you."

"But what—what am I supposed to do?" he moans, sobbing. "I can't—I can't—"

"You should go home, Danny," the ghost tells him. "Your parents, your friends, and your sister still don't know what happened to you. The device you are holding in your hands now—my medallion—is a trigger. Anyone who touches it will remember the truth about what happened, and ultimately, who you allow to hold it, to use it and to learn the truth about what's happened to you . . . that's your choice, Daniel."

"It would ruin my parents," Danny says, shaking his head as he looks down at it, thinking about his mom and dad, and he realizes that even they haven't completely forgotten everything, even now. Every other time his mom or dad found out about his ghost half, they accepted him with ease. Sure, they were troubled by the fact that they hunted him, but they'd never flinched when he'd used his powers or had that same intense guilt in their eyes whenever they saw him during those brief other moments when they knew the truth about his ghost-half. "They can barely handle my being half-ghost. They couldn't—my parents wouldn't be able to live with it. I don't even know if _I _can live with it."

"You can," the old ghost assures him gently. "It will be difficult, Danny, but you can get through this. You can survive this, and move forward."

"I can't bear this alone, though," Danny states, and then he pours everything out, the words tumbling as quickly as his tears. "It's too much. My parents, they—I mean—it's my fault. I get it. I should've told them sooner, and they didn't know what they were doing, but it's just—it hurts so much, and I can't—I don't know if I hate them, or if I can ever—I don't know."

"Then tell someone," the ghost suggests softly. "Someone that can help you deal with this. Someone that can understand and won't be broken if they help you bear the weight."

"But who? My sister, my friends . . . they'll be angry, upset, and horrified, and I know that if they find out, then . . . then my parents will, too, somehow," he says, because even as someone who's a master at adopting masks, Danny's not sure that even he has what it takes to pretend like everything is okay around his parents anymore, and if he can't, then his friends stand no chance. "And even if they don't . . . I don't think my friends can handle knowing about this, especially not Jazz. They'd never be willing to admit that . . . that it's not just my parent's fault, that it's my fault, too. I can't . . . I can't tell them."

"There are others in your life who might understand your situation better," Clockwork tells him, prodding gently, for he knows who Danny needs to go to now.

"Oh, yeah? Like who? Another ghost?"

Clockwork merely smiles at him. "You're half-right."

It's then that it dawns on Danny. He knows whom Clockwork refers to now, but he can't believe that the ghost is mad enough to suggest that he go to that man. "You think I should talk to Vlad?" he says, shaking his head. "He's almost as bad as—I mean, he's experimented on me! He tried to clone me and he practically tortured me while trying to get a sample of my mid-morph DNA!"

"Which means that he is in precisely the right position to understand the actions of both your parents and yourself," Clockwork explains calmly. "If you don't wish to burden your sister or your friends, then he is the best choice, Daniel."

Danny sighs, knowing the ghost is right, but he worries that the man will do something rash, too, if he discovers what his parents did to him. "He won't," says Clockwork, as if reading Danny's mind, but Danny knows the old ghost can't. He can merely anticipate possible futures and predict with reasonable accuracy what Danny will ask next, and in a way, it should be reassuring that he's doing this right now because it means that he's once again observing Danny's future.

Danny could still choose to question the ghost, to ask him why he's so certain, but it seems foolish since Danny knows exactly why Clockwork's so sure. "Okay, then," he agrees softly. "I'll talk to Vlad about it, and . . . and then I'll go home."

Danny doesn't want to return, but he knows that he has to. He's been gone too long already. His parents and friends are probably frantic, thinking that he's been kidnapped or something again, and he knows that Jazz probably feels betrayed since he told her her wouldn't go anywhere. Not one of them knows that anyone else's memories were tampered with, after all, and as Danny gazes down at the medallion, he intends to keep it that way. He'll hand the medallion to Vlad to let him remember what he's forgotten—if he's forgotten anything, that is, since Danny's not sure the billionaire would have known about what Danny's parents did to the boy—and then after that . . . well, hopefully he can think of something.

"I am truly sorry, Daniel," apologizes the ghost as Danny begins to leave. "For everything."

"I know," Danny sighs as he turns to leave. "But you were wrong about one thing. I do forgive you, you know. You're like my parents . . . you did something stupid because you thought it was right. Good intentions and roads to hell and all that stupid stuff. I did the same thing by keeping my secret . . . So I get it." Saying that his parents did something "stupid" feels like a gross understatement to Danny, but he's trying to protect himself. Belittling what's happened to him is part of how he copes.

So is humor, of course, but the whole incident feels too grim and weighs too heavily upon him right now for even Danny to make light of it. "Just from now on . . . keep watching my future, okay? I can't go through it twice. Please don't make me go through something like that twice."

"I've learned from my mistake," the ghost assures him, and Danny says nothing more as he leaves the ancient tower and ghost behind.

* * *

><p>It is three months since the day that Danny visited Clockwork and was given the time medallion, and he sits now in class, barely listening to Mr. Lancer's seemingly endless lecture. Most of the other students ignore Danny, their interest in him lost over the months as his brief celebrity status fades from memory. His friends, however, have been passing notes back and forth, and when they see him glance back curiously, Sam passes him a note from Tucker—<em>I can't believe he's giving a lecture on the last day of school! It's like the worst kind of torture in this heat!<em>—Danny can't stop himself from thinking that he can think of many, many things that are worse than Lancer's lectures. His friends have no idea how happy something as simple as sitting in even this hellishly hot classroom on the last day of school makes Danny simply because of how normal it is and how close he came to losing it all. In his pocket is a report card that proudly lists his passing grades. To some parents his report card—a collection of mostly C's and D's—would be a mark of shame. For Danny and his family, it'll be enough cause for a small celebration when he gets home tonight, and although he dreads being in the same room as his parents, even now, it's at least become a little easier for him to put on the mask now that he knows exactly what truth he's hiding behind it.

The bell finally rings and Lancer sighs as the kids charge out, ignoring his calls to make sure they do the summer reading and to be careful and have fun. The last student to leave, however, is taking his time, and Lancer smiles at him as he watches the boy pack up. His two friends are standing beside him with arms crossed, the girl impatiently tapping her foot as they send furtive glances at the door. "So you've survived another year, eh, Mr. Fenton?" he says, smiling at the boy and breaking up their conversation, and the boy looks back at him and grins. The smile's a real one this time, too. Although the boy is a master at hiding his feeling, Lancer is an actor of a sort, too, and he's always been able to tell the difference.

"I suppose," he replies sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck, and he gestures to his friends. "I'll be along in a second, okay?"

"Are you sure, dude?"

"Yeah, Tuck, it's fine. You two go ahead. I'll catch up," he tells them and the pair head out into the hall. Danny walks to the front of the room and takes a seat on one of the desks, flashing his teacher a cocky grin as he asks, "So what do you think my odds of graduating are next year?"

"Whatever you'd like them to be, Mr. Fenton," the teacher answers simply as he leans back against his own desk. Although the situation gives Lancer a sense of déjà vu because of their conversation a few months ago, the context is so drastically different that he can't help but feel relieved. "You're more than capable of doing the work. It's just a question of whether or not doing it is what matters the most to you."

"It matters, Mr. Lancer," the boy admits. "I don't know if it's always the most important thing to me, but it's close. I don't—I don't want to be stuck in Amity Park forever flipping burgers at the Nasty Burger."

"No fries with your future, eh?" the teacher chuckles.

"Well, maybe there will be some this summer," he grumbles. "Vlad told me I ought to get a job and learn something about balancing my personal life and stuff, so the Nasty Burger seems like a place to start. Can I put you down as a reference?"

"As long as you don't expect me to lie about your attendance record," the teacher replies, and Danny gives him another one of those rare, genuine smiles. "How is your mentorship with the mayor going? I never assumed that you'd be the sort that was interested in politics."

"It's not the politics I'm interested in," Danny says, and his face gets that distant, haunted look that is painful for Lancer to see. It's rumored that the boy knows what happened to him during those three weeks, now, and that those weeks were just as traumatic as everyone suspected. Danny, however, will not discuss it with anyone, or so Lancer was told, but from the look on his face now Lancer suspects that Danny and the mayor have been speaking about it quite a bit.

_At least he's talking to someone, _the teacher thinks, but aloud he merely asks, "So what is it that he's teaching you, then?"

"Oh, you know, life stuff," Danny answers vaguely, and he seems to be searching for something to tell Lancer, something that isn't a lie. "Time management's a big one. He makes me write out a schedule for the whole week that I'm expected to follow down to the minute, and then—well, I mean, I've been _trying _to do it, but it's hard, you know? Life doesn't always follow a schedule."

"At least not the ones we write," Lancer agrees. "So, Danny, perhaps if you're keeping yourself on track this summer then you might actually manage to get your summer reading done this year, eh?"

"I'll get it done," the boy replies without any hesitation.

"And perhaps if you were willing to read more than the required amount and write a short essay on those extra books, then I might be willing to give you a bit of extra credit at the beginning of the year," offers Lancer. "A head start, if you will, that will bring you closer to graduating."

"You'd seriously do that for me?" Danny gasps.

"I'd do it for any of my students who wanted it," Lancer replies, glancing at the clock. "Your friends are probably waiting for you, Mr. Fenton."

"Ah! You're right!" he exclaims, glancing at the door, but this time they're not so anxious that they're already listening in or poking their heads over the glass in a feeble attempt to spy on the pair. After all, his disappearance and suffering has largely faded from their memories as well even though Danny hasn't told either one what happened that day. It's his burden to bear, not theirs, and although they're not thrilled about his new association with the mayor or his decision to keep everything about those three weeks a secret from them, Danny managed to convince them to go along with it for now with the promise that if he started acting too much like their less-than-beloved mayor then they could feel free to do whatever they deemed necessary.

"Thanks, Mr. Lancer. Have a good summer. Don't, like, work too much, or uh . . . what the heck do teachers do on summer break, anyway?" he asks, and an image of an overweight, balding Lancer sitting on the beach in an ugly pair of swimming trunks and tanning under the summer sun almost makes the boy shudder.

"I usually read, Mr. Fenton," the teacher replies as if it's painfully obvious, and the boy gives a look of total disgust at the mere thought. The act of reading for fun is still lost on Daniel Fenton, and although it should make Lancer a bit sad, it mostly makes him happy that some things about the boy haven't changed.

* * *

><p>It's much, much later that night and Danny feels tired. The last day of school ought to be an easy day, but for Danny, it's been exhausting. After school he hung out with his friends for an hour before going to Vlad's. Danny still struggles to see Vlad as something other than an enemy, but it gets easier with every visit. Clockwork was right. The elder halfa is the best person for Danny to talk to and work through this with. Although Danny assumed that Vlad would regain no memories when he touched the medallion, he was wrong. Danny's parents, in that forgotten time, had gone to Vlad, had told them about what they'd done, what had happened to Danny and how they thought they'd killed him. They'd been seeking understanding in someone that they believed was a friend, someone they believed could help them figure out what to do about the whole mess and who had at least some basic understanding of the paranormal, yet as the words poured out of Maddie's mouth (for Jack had barely spoken a word since the incident), it became clear that the man was anything but understanding.<p>

Rather than showing his parents—or at least Maddie—sympathy, he'd screamed at them and almost slaughtered them on the spot. He'd insisted that their ignorance was no excuse, that the pair should have figured out the boy's secret sooner when he started failing classes or when every single invention they made "malfunctioned" around him, or that they should have noticed his injuries despite his pathetic attempts to hide them. His parents, however, had insisted that they had made an honest mistake—how could they have possibly known, the whole idea was ludicrous and made no sense whatsoever, and really, Danny hadn't been doing _that _badly in school and he hadn't actually been seriously injured at any point, had he?

And at that point Vlad had lost it completely and transformed in front of them. "It's a mistake if it happens once," he'd told them coldly. "If you don't realize the effects that your irresponsibleness and inventions have on the people you care about once, then perhaps that _could _be forgiven. But your ignorance and carelessness has created two of us, and both times, you've failed to notice. Both times, the two of you allowed yourself to be distracted by your new toys and each other so much that you have failed to see the pain that those creations you've made have caused! You never came to see me in the hospital and how I suffered through it, yet Daniel _lived _with you and was clearly suffering enough for his sister and friends to notice! How could you miss something so painfully obvious?"

Of course, the answer to that was as simple and obvious as the truth: People rarely let themselves see what they don't want to believe is true. Although the signs were there, neither of his parents were willing to believe that their son could possibly be the type of creature that they had dedicated their lives to hunting, that they both despised. And even now they both struggle to believe it, for Danny sees it in their expressions every day. Every instant that he is not his alter ego or that he is not using their powers, his parents pretend that he is nothing more than their completely human son, and Danny lets them. There's no point in pushing it, or so he believes.

The memories of those weeks changed Vlad in small ways. He is, of course, still a fruit loop, but the way he thinks about Danny and the boy's family is different. His mother's name is one that rarely crosses Vlad's lips anymore—no longer is she his goddess, his dream—and the memory of those weeks without Danny, without the boy that Vlad continues to wish is his son, makes the billionaire more wary about how he treats the boy. He does not wish to lose Danny again, and although he is tough on the boy, there is a parental love behind those actions that wasn't there before, a hesitancy whenever he begins to lose his temper and push Danny too hard, a shame about how he once contemplated destroying him when Danny ruined his plans, time and time again.

Vlad quickly realized how dangerous the device from Clockwork is, for he knows that if the boy's parents or friends or sister recover the memories they've lost, it will destroy them and what little hope the boy has for a normal life left with it. Danny doesn't want Jazz to hate his parents, or for his parents to be forced to live with the guilt and self-loathing that Danny knows would break them even more than just knowing that they used to hunt their own son does. The weight is hard enough for Danny to carry, and even now he knows he can only hold it with Vlad's help. Yet inside of him he carries another weight, as well, no matter how weightless it might literally be: Clockwork's medallion.

The only way to keep it permanently out of the hands of his family and friends was for Vlad to do to Danny as Danny's future self once did: to fuse it inside of him, leaving it intangible and untouchable no matter what form Danny was in. It was the best—and only—hiding spot the boy could come up with that no one save Vlad would stand a chance of breaking into, and Danny knows that Vlad won't dare. Much as the billionaire might want his parents to suffer for what they did to Danny, he respects the boy's choice to keep it a secret from them, to keep on protecting them. Vlad thinks that they don't deserve it.

Yet Danny does.

And in the end, it's his life, his burden, and his choice, and out of respect for the boy, Vlad agrees to let it be. Danny can see that it eats the billionaire up inside, little by little, but he hopes that maybe he can keep the billionaire from losing his cool and attacking his family, in part because Danny's torn about what he himself will do if Vlad starts attacking his parents. He's not sure if he would save them or let Vlad do whatever he pleased to the two people that he still sees sometimes as monsters. It's a thought that makes him uncomfortable, and so instead of letting it come to pass, he continues to make Vlad swear not to touch them and hopes to avoid that future. From what Clockwork told him that day, it's possible.

As expected, his parents and sister did have a small celebration for him. Both his mom and dad are proud of Danny and his silly report card, since they know at least some of the burdens he carries now that he's resumed his role as the town's protector. Getting those grades was nearly impossible yet Danny succeeded, in part because getting through each day with his oblivious parents is just so much harder. He's reached a point where he can sit in the room with them, but Danny still flinches every time his mother or father touches him, every time his mother kisses his forehead or his dad squeezes him in a bear hug. The sweet moments make him want to scream, yet they also make him want to forgive them even more.

_They don't know_, he told himself silently as he bore their seemingly endless stream of hugs tonight. _They didn't know. It wasn't just their fault. It was mine, too._

Most of the evening passes by in a blur, which is fine with Danny. There are other days where every moment is so painstakingly long that he wants to weep, but this is not one of them. Maybe it's because this time his happiness isn't completely fake. He is, after all, proud of his stupid grades, his average scores, and it's been weeks since anyone other than Vlad has even mentioned his disappearance. There are a lot of reasons to be happy, or at the very least, to be content.

Even though he knows he'll never forget what happened and even though he's still struggling to cope with it, Danny knows that eventually things will get better. They already have, after all, in the smallest of ways, and even though it will never be perfect, Danny doesn't need it to be.

The End

**A/N: Bah. That's all I have to say about this ending. I wrote it, scrapped it, rewrote it, scrapped it, and after the third rewrite, I'm still not thrilled with it, but I just can't seem to get it quite right. Endings have always been tough for me, but then again, maybe I'm just being too hard on myself with this one. It's a bad habit of mine, especially when it comes to my writing. :)**

**Anyway, to everyone who reviewed, favorited, alerted, or simply kept reading this story, I just want to say thanks so much for all of your support! I figured that my first multi-chapter fic on this site would be largely ignored, so seriously, thanks so much, everyone! Hopefully I'll have a new story started pretty soon, although whether it's the continuation of "Ten Minutes to the End" or something else I haven't quite figured out yet since none of the stories I have in mind are cooperating with me much right now. :) **

**And, as always, a review would be lovely from those of you that have the time to leave one. ;)**

'**Til next time!**


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